Food

While the US continues to use the price of chicken eggs as a political (American) football, closer to home our concern is with eggs of a sweeter kind. This year has seen chocolate prices rise dramatically. The price of cocoa had remained stable for decades, but in November 2023 it rocketed and has remained high ever since: it is currently almost three times what it was 18 months ago. The sudden increase came about after particularly poor harvests in West Africa, where more than 80 per cent of the world’s cocoa is grown. Extreme weather, in the form of both record-breaking high temperatures and then very heavy rains, have ravaged the cocoa plantations in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

There’s a well-known clip from daytime TV show This Morning where celebrity chef Gino D’Acampo is cooking a classic Italian pasta dish. Holly Willoughby, one of the presenters, tastes it and says: ‘Do you know, if it had, like, ham in it, it’s closer to a British carbonara?’ D’Acampo, in his Italian-accented perfect English, looks at her in horror before replying: ‘If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.’ This phrase goes round and round in my head as I stand agog in my supermarket’s bakery aisles. Where once there might have been one choice of hot cross bun as we hurtle towards Easter – perhaps one ‘standard’ and one ‘luxury’ in the bigger shops – our options now extend as far as the eye can see.

Almost 50 years ago, in a hotel bar in central Paris, French wine faced a reckoning. Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, decided California deserved a spell in the sun: at the time French wine was the dominant force in Europe, with bottles from the New World – Australia, New Zealand, the US and the like – considered their poor cousin. Spurrier came up with the idea to pit the very best French Bordeaux against Californian cabernet sauvignons and chardonnays against white Burgundies, and have a panel of experts – all French – rank them in a blind tasting that came to be known as the Judgment of Paris. California won both categories. Odette Khan, a well-known critic, reportedly demanded her scorecard back so news of her grave error wouldn’t reach the papers.

Dubai-style chocolate, viral star of TikTok and Instagram, is so popular that Waitrose is limiting sales to two bars per customer. The upmarket supermarket chain has taken the move, the Times reports, ‘because we want everyone to have the chance to enjoy this delicious chocolate’. Some are sceptical. Steve Dresser, who heads up consultancy Grocery Insight, has questioned whether this is a marketing ploy, with Waitrose ‘trying to generate scarcity’. The supermarket says no, assuring the Grocer of the ‘incredible popularity’ of these £10 confectionery bars. It’s incredible all right. Even Waitrose’s yellow sticker fare is beyond my budget, so to me a tenner for a slab of chocolate sounds not so much indulgent as fall-of-the-Habsburgs decadent.

This morning, as usual, I was woken up by the large ball of golden fluff that is my dog, Honey. At a time she considers decent, she bounds on to my bed, tail wagging furiously, to tell me it’s time for her breakfast. Honey still has the puppyish bounce she has always had – even though, at the age of almost 12, she is gently settling into canine old age. And I’d go so far as to say that what I give her to eat has a lot to do with her youthfulness. Eye-roll as much as you like, but I believe one of the key reasons Honey is thriving is because she hasn’t eaten meat for more than six years. Yes, my dog is vegan. Not that she realises that, of course: as far as she’s concerned, she still gets the same sausages, dog chews and choice of dry and wet foods as she’s always had.

One can see a city so differently over time. Visiting Oxford recently I noticed fine whisky shops and fashion stores which have always been there but which I barely registered as a student 15 years ago. There are new arrivals: some good, such as the handsome Jericho Cheese Company; others less so, such as the proliferating bubble tea shops catering to the now numerous Chinese, both students and tourists. Covered Market is still there, where we used to indulge at the original Ben’s Cookies. Though I do not remember back then the Thames Valley Police signs now warning of ‘bag dippers’ operating in the area. Oxford is both swisher and scruffier than I remember it. Swish embodied in the new Ivy, in a palatial neo-Gothic pile on the High Street that used to be a NatWest.