Richard Sennett

At a House of Commons cocktail party I suddenly noticed a friend’s face contorted like ‘The Scream’ of Edvard Munch. Could it be yet more bad news for Labour? No, she was being offered a plate of smoked salmon, probably her thousandth munch for the year. I entirely sympathised; the stuff usually served up is fatty and tasteless. But now that the fishing season is upon us, you can do something about it. Salmon was once so plentiful in the British Isles that a medieval journeyman’s contract specified it would be on the workshop in-house menu no more than three times a week. In modern times, c.

What passes for summer is finally upon us in the British Isles. Between bouts of rain, we can finally inhale the sun-tan oil, note that last year’s swimsuit seems to have shrunk over the winter and fire up the barbecue. Cooking outdoors connects us to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and, while the Oxford Culinary Conference undoubtedly has views on who once tended the cave’s fire, the barbecue today is a male preserve. The mittens and apron, the lengthy spatula and prongs, the double gin-and-tonic: these are the couture, jewellery and perfume which compensate the cooking male for the fact that he is no longer fit to be seen near-naked in the sea or at poolside. Unfortunately, the modern Neanderthal tends to make a mess of the food itself.

Recently I enticed my niece to a gastronome’s dinner during the London Food Festival. She is about to enter university, and I thought it was about time she learnt to taste. The evening proved a disaster; after a lengthy discussion of saffron she turned to me and asked, with quiet rage, ‘How can they carry on about an expensive spice when people are starving?’ How young she is, and how deeply am I sunk in the last sensual pleasure remaining to the elderly bourgeois. In one way of course my niece is quite right. In 40 years, when she is my age, the world will probably be afflicted by food riots which may make the riots in Africa and South America this spring seem tame.

‘No buffalo-thyme pizza?’ The grazing grounds around Naples are poisoned, grounds on which herds of water buffalo feed to produce Italy’s most delicate cheese. This ecological disaster has had a knock-on effect even here in Texas, where a rather-too-elegant youth and I are taking a snack break from the rigours of the Obama campaign. Sales of buffalo mozzarella in Italy are down 30 per cent to 40 per cent, South Korea bans its import and high-class eateries like the one we are in no longer serve it. The mere fact that a political operative could ask for buffalo-thyme pizza signals an earthquake of sorts in American life.

‘Ecraser l’infâme!’ Voltaire proclaimed in his war on corrupt priests and crooked government officials. Delia’s Smith’s new book How to Cheat at Cooking opens up a whole new field of infamy: the culinary crime. As in 18th-century politics, so in 21st-century cuisine, it’s the public who gets cheated. Madame Smith’s sassy title is meant to suggest you can get away with using frozen or canned ingredients and still make good food; the sassiness is a piece of nonsense. All cooks use store-prepared ingredients of one sort or another — pasta, ground coffee and ice-cream, to name just a few. It’s a question of which prepared ingredients you use and how you use them.

In the midst of an author tour for a new book, I am confronting both the worst evils of fast food and some surprising exceptions. Writers today cannot simply write books; readers want to see you in the flesh, talk to you, send you thoughts or their own fledgling manuscripts. I actually enjoy the human contact, but the tours are compressed travel, usually one-day excursions to a city crammed with interviews and bookstore visits built around a formal event. It’s a challenge to find something good to eat on the run. The Hell of Heathrow is filled with those junk-food pizza and burger pit stops which make Jamie Oliver’s blood boil — yet the travelling foodie is not condemned to despair.

It happened in New York. As I reached for a small basket of ‘heirloom tomatoes, Little Compton Farms’ I felt my lips curling slightly — was it out of pity or contempt? — on account of the poor soul next to me who had merely chosen ‘vine-ripened organic’. It happened in New York. As I reached for a small basket of ‘heirloom tomatoes, Little Compton Farms’ I felt my lips curling slightly — was it out of pity or contempt? — on account of the poor soul next to me who had merely chosen ‘vine-ripened organic’. At the checkout counter the sun-ripened young woman ringing up my purchase favoured me with a warm, sympathetic smile. We happy few.