Brittany Holloway-Brown/Eater
Ruby Tandoh revisits the soothing joys of a “normal, perfect bite of the world”
I can’t stop thinking about food. Everything is falling apart, but all I can think about is the softness of fondant icing when you press in a birthday candle. Refreshing the application form for Universal Credit, I daydream about biting the heads off jelly babies. I scroll through terrible news while thinking about the snap of fridge-cold chocolate. Idly threading spaghetti hoops onto the prongs of a fork, finding a Minstrel down the back of the sofa, kissing a freshly-steamed bao on its bottom. These are the thoughts that clutter my mind.
I started noticing these food pleasures a couple of years ago. At a time when bullshit wellness chat seemed to be reaching its zenith, writing down these moments of food joy became a kind of peaceable resistive act. If food was going to be a focus of endless speculation, suspicion and fuss, I figured we should at least let our curiosity guide us towards those food details that bring us joy. Instead of calories, I wanted to zoom in on the smell of a just-opened packet of Percy Pigs. Rather than getting hung up on grams of protein, I thought about eating raspberries off fingertips and the layer of scorched, crispy rice — the tahdig — at the bottom of the pan.
I compiled these little bits of food joy in lists and posted them on Twitter, asking people to send in their suggestions. I called them Good Food Things, which is awkwardly phrased and weirdly mundane and therefore completely in keeping with the spirit of the moments it captures. A Good Food Thing is something completely embedded in the plodding rhythms of day-to-day life: it is not a big meal out or a whole side of salmon; it isn’t a big, sweeping concept; it has precisely nothing to do with novelty or innovation or the culinary avant-garde. It is a normal, perfect bite of the world. It is finding seven McNuggets in a box of six.
At a time when everything is in flux, there’s something soothing about how normal these food moments are
As soon as I started posting the lists, my notifications filled with chatter about the crispy edges of lasagne, butter melting on oven-warm bread and the art of unfurling a cinnamon bun to reach the sweet, doughy middle. Some people talked about strings of molten pizza cheese and the jumble of textures in samosa chaat. Others daydreamed about wafer-less KitKats and ghee bubbling on hot parathas. There were a few common themes. Butter, bread, pasta, cheese, and potatoes came up over and over. Roast dinners were well-represented, too. Crisps were a particular favourite: Hula Hoops eaten from pudgy fingers, Wotsit dust, salty crisp dregs poured straight from bag to mouth.
When lockdown came into effect last month, I started revisiting these food pleasures. I hadn’t planned to orchestrate some grand revival. It just happened as if by some psychological reflex: the more overwhelming everything became, the more space food took up in my thoughts. With uncertainty about all the big stuff — work, health, family, money — looming larger than ever, I found comfort in the details. And I’m not the only one: new submissions of Good Food Things have flooded in as people seek solace from the unrelenting bleakness of the news. People have begun to daydream about the crack, hiss, and fizz of an ice-cold can in the park and about the candy floss-pink sugar sludge at the bottom of a bowl of strawberries and cream. Even as our future enjoyment of these pleasures begins to look uncertain, they continue to shimmer and seduce.
At a time when everything is in flux, there’s something soothing about how normal these food moments are: they can be as simple as slurping a chewy udon noodle or peeling an apple in one long ribbon. They exist in every meal, at every price point, in every cuisine and setting. Considering how many among us continue to work — often long hours, risking their health and without the pay or protection they deserve — while the world is turned upside-down, this egalitarianism feels important. These joys don’t need to be home-cooked or lovingly sourced. They’re everywhere already: the first sip of water that you didn’t know you needed; the sound of frying plantain; toast made for you by someone else. All you need to do is notice.
Your food pleasures won’t be the same as mine — the best of them emerge from deep within the routines and rituals of one person’s life. It takes one thousand normal mouthfuls to taste a particularly delicious one for what it is. You can’t know how lovely it is to eat two chocolate buttons stuck bottom-to-bottom unless you’ve munched through countless lone stragglers. The king bite — the best of every component of a roast dinner, curated into the perfect forkful — won’t dazzle you if you’ve never had to eat thankless mouthfuls of gravy-less greens. Catching a drip of ice cream before it falls, that one sugar-crusted piece of popcorn, sipping your tea at the Goldilocks moment it hits the perfect temperature… This is the stuff that life is made of: sparks of beautiful, ordinary hope.