How the hummus crisis spoiled our 21st-century Abigail’s Party
WHERE were you last week when the great British hummus crisis hit? The shock one in which the dip vanished from the shelves of many supermarkets? Were you? A) Quietly falling apart as you stared, dazed and confused, at an empty shelf in Sainsbury’s or M&S. B) Drinking a caramel latte in your local coffee bar when you became aware, as you surfed the news reports, of the shocking truth about the hummus shortages. C) At a party, grimacing your way through a mouthful of some dip which you then began to wonder might be some kind of artisan vegan cat food, but you later found out was the host’s first attempt at homemade hummus, gone wrong. D) None of the above, though you can totally understand why the absence of hummus, the lifeblood of every middle-class party or picnic, is a first world problem of the first order. E) What hummus crisis?
I was leafing through a newspaper when I came across an article on how the dip had been removed from certain supermarket shelves because of complaints of a metallic taste. I looked online and on Twitter. A lot of people were having a laugh, but many were treating it like a real issue. There’s something cathartic, perhaps, about making a big fuss over a small thing, a shortage that’s not even a real shortage when all too often on the news it feels like the world is veering towards apocalypse.
Over the past decade the chick pea and olive oil dip has spread like magnolia paint through aspirational British households so that now it would be hard to imagine what a middle-class party would be like without it. Around 41 per cent of households in the UK, the hummus capital of Europe, have a pot in their fridge.
For any party host, hummus is now the safe option, the beige of party dips – even beige in hue, unless it’s got beetroot or roasted red peppers or chocolate added, which increasingly it has. Such are the British perversions of the dish that most people from the Lebanon, Palestine or Israel wouldn’t recognise the dip that graces our tables.
Meanwhile, this hummus crisis is just one of many middle-class food issues that Britons have fretted over in recent times – some of them rightly so. Last year it was the avocado crisis – which was not so much a food crisis as an ethical dilemma wrapped in a rainforest crisis, all of which was just a symptom of the fact the avocado had become such an on-trend food that in Mexico they were chopping down rainforests to plant the fruit trees.
But the hummus crisis is different, easier to laugh about since it doesn’t relate to any real shortage and doesn’t serve as a reminder that we are slowly eating the planet with our aspirational lives.
The problem here seems to have been something mysterious in hum- mus supplier Bakkavor’s manufacturing process.
The whole thing got me imagining domestic incidents across the land reminiscent of the cucumber sandwich scene in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest. In it Algernon, having eaten all the cucumber sandwiches made for his newly-arrived VIP guest Lady Bracknell, asks his butler, Lane, why there are no cucumber sandwiches. Lane replies that he has been to the market twice, and there were no cucumbers “not even for ready money”.
A modern-day updating would probably have Algernon unpacking the shopping. “Mate, where’s the hummus?” he asks.
“There was no hummus at the supermarket this morning. I went down twice.” “No hummus??” “No. Not even for ready money. Perhaps we could go back to trusty cucumber sandwiches instead?”
“Nah. There must be some white bean and dukkah dip you can get somewhere.”
Since the 1970s, the party snack has been one of the ultimate ways of keeping up with the Joneses, the Abigail’s Party accessory, a symptom of how we seek to show the world through food the kind of people we are. And what hummus speaks of is someone who feels, rather fuzzily, global, healthy and modern.
Hummus even retains this aura of smug healthiness around it, in spite of the fact that, in its supermarket form, it’s a mass-produced, processed food – one recent report pointed out shop-bought hummus contains huge amounts of salt and fat.
Let “hummusgate” be a reminder of what nonsense these aspirational eating trends are. In the UK the rich are getting richer, and almost everyone else is getting poorer – yet many of us, apart from those who can only afford the very cheapest of foods, are involved in some kind of aspirational eating. Most of us probably know it’s just an illusion, a fiction. Yet still we swallow it down. Still we eat our way up with the Joneses.
For any party host, hummus is now the safe option, the beige of party dips - unless it’s got beetroot or roasted red peppers or chocolate added