‘Hullo!’ shouted the housemate. ‘I’ve brought home some lamb chops I want to grill on the coals. Isn’t it a lovely calm evening? D you still eat meat or are your food politics all vegan?’
“I’m a flexitarian locavore,’ I answered smoothly without a pause. ‘Whose lambs were these before they became chops?’
I have a whole new baffling vocabulary, a witchy discourse of green living, eating local and suffering nightmares about genetically modified maize or dubious biofuels.
‘Oh goddess spare me,’ said Una in a very ungreen tone of voice. ‘This reminds me of your passion for the dead writer Roberto Bolano. That lasted for eight months or more. All you thought about was Bolano.’
‘Bolano mi amor,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I still think he was the greatest writer of the new century, but there isn’t much of his work in print. Love is hard to sustain without print. I can’t believe I just said that. Dead-tree reading is so passe.’
Green witches are the new black. No more babbling and Twittering about the dark moon and raising cones of power. It is all about frugal meals with hand-harvested beans and chuckng away the imported Maldon salt. I sat and read a long and rather bloody article about a Jewish food activist who has decided to ritually slaughter his own chickens to make sure the meat is kosher and that he stays in touch with the messier aspects of the food chain.
How I admire that. I should maybe think about silencing a few lambs myself, but we’re not eco-purist enough for that yet.
My brilliant meta-spiritual insight from this morning’s meditation, breathing in and out and noticing the touch of breath on the upper lip (yes, boring as all hell, but I am gettng better at it, I am, I am) was that I should plant a large half-barrel of Swiss chard. This is amazingly economical and very ‘cut and come again’. I had Swiss chard from the back garden for months last year, to use with tomatoes in pasta sauces and with mushrooms and brown rice and with beans, well you know all about the bean fetish by now. The stalks of Swiss chard are very tasty when sauteed with garlic in a little olive oil and are called ‘blettes‘ by the French.
I am making endless notes on the spirituality of food politicsand talking foodie revolution to everyone who will listen. Una ignores me and goes on eating what she likes to eat, which includes fried eggs and bacon and grilled lamb chops. How I love her and how lucky I am to live with somebody who does not mind my sense of humour.
Especially as I am wondering if a long passionate letter on the primacy of food politics and my near hero worship of Michael Pollan will just make the ex-lover more ex-?
Love in an imperfect world.
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