The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
…and Delia’s recipe for a brave new world
With Christmas cracked, Britain’s favourite cook has set herself a bigger challenge: fixing humanity
224pp, Mensch, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £11.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
We now know what Delia Smith has been doing since she published her last cookery book in 2013. She has been reading science and philosophy – Teilhard de Chardin and The Lancet and others – and these are her thoughts on it. They are a call for revolution, which will melt the heads of people who do not think that revolutionaries look like Delia Smith.
Smith is obsessed with the “untapped capacities we don’t know about, buried beneath an outward show of control and rationality”. She calls humans “a crowning glory” with “unlimited ingenuity and potential” due to the unique conscious mind. She believes that we occupy a special place within the universe and therefore have a special destiny. (I am not so sure, but I am not a Christian, as she is. I do not share her faith.) And so, she calls for an end to nation states and the rule of egotistical tyrants, and a great global movement to end the problems of the world.
Initially, I think it is mad, reading a woman who taught us how to boil eggs tackle cosmology and psychology and evolution and climate change. But as her calm prose settles on me – You Matter reads precisely like one of her cookery books, it is uncanny – I think her decision makes sense. It is still a recipe, just an uncommonly ambitious one. She always called herself a teacher, not a cook, and food is no longer enough for her.
I wonder, perhaps more than is seemly, why she is writing this. Perhaps the very question is internalised misogyny. I suspect she had a spiritual crisis, recovered, and now wants to share it, and is also vexed by Brexit and our poor – I euphemise, because her understated politeness is catching – politicians. I am reading You Matter on a train, and I tell the woman sitting opposite me about it. She is a fan of Smith who cooks Christmas Day meals to her precise instructions, and she cries in agony: “The Christmas countdown! The last 36 hours!” It was, she says, too controlling, too directed, too much. Perhaps Delia felt the same. You see her only in glimpses, but she alludes to her “teeming mind”.
And so, she advocates stillness – she is too self-conscious to call it meditation or mindfulness – to summon the power to charge ourselves, and then our world. She tells us how special we are and how, together, with technology and faith, we can build it anew. You Matter is narcotic for its ambition and the elegance of its language but is it possible or is she dreaming in her palace? (Smith is by any measurement very rich.) She doesn’t really talk about class except implicitly. Self-fulfilled people are happier and kinder, she says, and she is right, but how does the average person become self-fulfilled amid the babble, the poverty, and the fear? It will take more than stillness, which is a prayer, and so sometimes she sounds credulous.
She believes, for instance, that technology will remove physical labour, and give us more leisure time, and though that is potentially true, it hasn’t happened yet: ask any Amazon delivery driver. I also found her references to the Holocaust jarring, though she cites survivors respectfully. Did people really survive due to “the thought that human life has meaning, however dim and distant it may seem?” And, if they didn’t survive, did they die because they didn’t think human life has meaning? When she writes about the emergence of a “collective consciousness”, I thought, rather cruelly – does she mean Twitter? And when she called Steve Jobs “a great thinker”, did she know of the treatment of the Chinese people who made his products? She is thin on practicalities: know thyself, know others, organise. She is very impressed, for instance, with Greta Thunberg. But she seems to have little faith in conventional politics, and so writes like an idealist, far outside them; or a far-Leftist.
Even so, I think she is right about the possibilities, though people might laugh at her, due entirely to the cognitive dissonance of her appearance and her dreams. I wonder if it is all a great metaphor for her own life: I Am a Rock, she says, by Paul Simon, is her favourite song. (“I am a rock; I am an island.”) All this makes me like Smith, though I have no faith in her revolution because most people are lazier than she is, and I do not agree that we can overcome the egotistical “high and mighty” before they blow us up. But it is love that comes out of these pages: love for people. She did always want to feed us.