FOOD

Apart from music seeping all around us like nerve gas pumped into department stores, restaurants and lifts, cafes, gyms, sports and shoe shops, from out of the doorways of tartan tat shops, the most pervasive and abrasive assault on our senses are the ubiquitous images of food.

The BBC website hosts visual references to a vast array of strategies to deal with our hunger for variety: 1300 Recipes; Favourite Recipes; Recipes from Programmes; Halloween Recipes; Find the Perfect Recipes; Food in Season; Featured Chefs; Cooking Techniques; Cooking Abroad; Junior Master Chef; Simple Suppers; Saturday Kitchen; Eat Well for Less; From Your Garden to Your Plate; Hairy Bikers Best of British; Sunday Brunch; Food...and Drink; and the curiously named The Koreans who televise themselves eating dinner.

This last programme involves a participant eating in front of a web cam watched by thousands of viewers. If they like the way you eat they will actually pay you.

Does this have a subversive motive?  Are there North Koreans sitting down to watch, covertly, in front of bland bowls of bran, buckwheat and grass? 

On the programme, spicy raw squid is a favourite.  Should the audience rub their tummies in glee and lick their chops in appreciation of this naked act of consumption, viewers award the contestants with star balloons in appreciation of their performance.  An aural aspect is added to the fun.  A microphone is placed near the mouth of the eater so that every slurp, crunch, gargle, guzzle, gulp, burp and belch of the masticator is heard clearly by the audience.

But the performance can have a brutal component too: the sponsors will pay on the reaction of the audience who are in control of a "pay" button.

Back to Edinburgh.  

Last year I attended an annual general meeting of the Scottish Refugee Council and was surprised to learn from a pamphlet published by a Bangladeshi organisation that there are more than 70 Bengali/Bangladeshi restaurants and take-aways in the city.  Add to that a plethora of eating places round every corner in Edinburgh:  brasseries, bistros, grill-rooms, hash houses, greasy spoons rotisseries, tea shops and coffee houses.  You can't walk 50 yards without having your nose twitch as you pass a Greggs, a Kebab house or a Piemaker.  You will find more eating places in the city centre than pubs in Leith, though most of them now sell food as well.

The description of the fare is meant to amuse:  Soupy Goods; Probably the best scones in Scotland (and possibly the worst); In-house sausage; Burger fix; Friendly and quaint, said of the Curious Tea Rooms. And what wouldn't attract you to The Wee Gurkha Curry House in East Kilbride, the Shish Mahal in Glasgow or the Pomegranate with shisha - hookah in Edinburgh?

Chocolate covered ants was a favourite of mine in school.  Gerald Bullen brought them in a poke and we all tried one.  They were available at Coopers, a forerunner of a deli in the West End of Glasgow. But why to pay money when you can make your own:

DIRECTIONS

1.    Catch ants at a picnic site and keep them in a glass jar to which you have added a teaspoon of sugar to keep them happy.  (Unhappy ants are liable to go sour before processing.)

2.    At home, pick up each ant with tweezers and remove entrails with a small, very sharp knife edge.

3.    This will take about 400 hours.

4.    If you are in a hurry, eliminate this step; you'll never know the difference.

5.    Dip each ant into melted chocolate and place to drain on waxed paper.

6.    If any of them are still able to crawl off the paper, be a good sport and let them go.

I am a self-confessed vegetarian and I can tell many a tale about the kind of reactions that this confession sometimes elicits.  The long and winding road to vegetarianism all started in a wee hippy flat near Stirling after a post hash smoking session, but I won't go into that. And I won't go into the logic of my choice except to say I have compassion for animals that are alive but don't have a taste for their cooked carcasses.

One time, a long time ago, I went to a pub/restaurant with a friend of mine returning to his hometown from America where he's now settled.  He had a plate of sea food and I think they had just passed the failed-attempts-to-leap-out-of-the-pot-of-boiling-water stage. Some of the things were blue.  I can't think of anything more off-putting than eating blue food, unless it's the icing on a birthday cake under dim candle light. I had nightmares that night.  Screaming animals with bleeding eyes were moving on my plate. 

Once we had a visitor from Taiwan and she told us how she would chase worm-like food on her plate with a pair of chopsticks.  Sanmakji is live octopus cut into small pieces and still wriggling.  All the restaurants have a problem with non-meat or fish dishes.  Everything looked raw, uncooked and possibly not dead.  Even the vegetable seemed to have the features of sentient beings with sad expressions.

I'll stick with vegetarianism.  

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