Lighten up
AGROMENES reads The Guardian and The Observer not because he always agrees with their judgements, but because he knows where these newspapers are coming from. They aren’t owned by rich men seeking to influence UK politics without paying UK taxes and they genuinely care about the marginalised. However, there’s a price to pay. The fashionably woke can be as infuriating as any libertarian lunacy. There’s a limit to my interest in vegan recipes from little-known parts of south-east Asia and in page after page devoted to Joan Bakewell.
Yet all that is bearable for the sake of good writing, real insight and a determination to seek a better world. The thing that would really redeem these newspapers, however, would be a sense of humour. So many of the committed left, echoing the dogmatic right, find it almost impossible to laugh at themselves. They simply lack proportion.
Joking demands proportionality and humour is based on recognising the out of place, the overblown and the plain silly. It is, therefore, an immensely civilising force, hated by extremists of all kinds. It brings us all down to earth and faces us with life’s contradictions in a palatable form. That’s why it can so often achieve change where more prosaic argument fails. For the writer, it’s a powerful means of self-discipline. Not to recognise that you’re caricaturing yourself is the fatal flaw of the dogmatic commentator.
I take as my example not the political reporting nor the comment on international affairs, but the current issue of Observer Food Monthly. It’s the place where farming, local food production, the environment and the countryside might meet. Of course, we understand this will not be confined to Britain, but will seek to cover a wide range of tastes and recipes from many cultures.
Oh, for a new take on bubble and squeak, leek and potato soup, sorrel and spinach
Nevertheless, a sense of balance might question why 10 pages of vegetarian recipes should immediately be followed with a further section on trendy food entitled ‘The next big thing and how to spot it’. Unless, of course, it is self-mockery of a high order. How, otherwise, could anyone have penned the sentence ‘The Sriracha years were John the Baptist compared to the coming of the One True Condiment’. This evidently means that one hot-chilli sauce has been replaced among trendies by another that consists mainly of a mixture of fried onions and chillies and is called something else.
That’s po-faced enough, but the senseof-humour failure reaches its apogee in the final column labelled ‘Ten Tips for 2021’. Included in this important list of new foods are such well-known staples as smoked salts, banana blossom, teff and young garbanzo. But the killer is the item at number one. This reads: ‘Corn Ribs—corncobs carved to look like spare ribs; pioneered at Momofuku Ssämbar in New York, spotted at London’s Fallow and Glasgow’s Ka Pao!’ Ten out of 10 for obscure foodie knowledge and absolute zero for a sense of humour.
Absolute zero, too, for recognition that a high proportion of the readers of The Observer live in the UK and might occasionally relish some local food, grown by local farmers. Yet, this January, we start with Gujarati vegetarian recipes, proceed via Mexican cook strips and end with the taste of Korea. No celebration of our winter vegetables, our stews and hotpots or the roasts in which, even during the darkest days of British food, we excelled. Oh, for a new take on bubble and squeak, leek and potato soup, sorrel and spinach. Oh, for taking foodies, Sriracha and North London a bit less seriously.
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