Eat Me
So, last night I had what I’d happily admit was a very tasty quiche. For most people, that wouldn’t be a revelation; they’d have had enough quiches in the past to know that some could, in fact, be very tasty. Those are probably the same people who wouldn’t be kind of surprised every time they have a tangerine and think “This is great!” I like to call those people “Everyone who isn’t me.” Those people, unlike me, are unafraid of food, and I am almost continuously jealous of them.
I’m not sure where my fear of food came from; I used to blame my upbringing, but that’s not completely true, because my palette used to be even smaller than my sisters’ for reasons that have to have some kind of non-parental influence. For one thing, my family had quiche on a semi-regular basis, in much the same way that all of our meals seemed to happen on a semi-regular basis (And then there were the things we ate on a very clearly regular basis; Fridays meant a visit to the local fish-and-chip shop, something that was so ingrained in my psyche that I missed it when I moved out to go to art school, even though I could eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted), but I never developed a taste for it. Fish in general was another McMillan family staple, and something that I never discovered the ability to enjoy or even be able to put in my mouth without shuddering (Even today, even with fish I like, I have to suppress some inner shake).
I knew what I liked, and I kept to it; even when I moved out and had the run of the supermarket myself – Or, to be more honest, the run of the frozen foods aisles of the supermarket, given my lack of anything resembling cookery skills – I kept to the same kinds of things, safe and far away from anything I might have mistakenly considered overly exotic (Amongst said things: Soup, rice and almost any pasta. I have no idea why). These completely irrational food fears stayed with me until adulthood and then some, and it’s only in the last few years that I’ve really started overcoming them, if “overcoming” can be translated as “realizing how stupid they were in the first place.” It’s led to some embarrassment, especially in restaurants or eating with friends, definitely, but also a surreal world of discoveries, even if they’re discoveries that most people have made thirty years earlier than I managed them. Apparently, there’s some kind of reward for being slow and cowardly, after all.
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I can’t eat fish, anymore – well, except tuna. I can’t eat fish suppers, is the thing. Cod gives me night sweats and terrible dreams. I once had two pieces of Cap’n Birds Eye while watching The Shining, and ended up tripping so hard I saw the face of God
To describe it as a Spectrum loading screen of corporate logos blossoming out of the quivering fleshy mass of a conveyor-belt hermaphrodite would be to understate the terror of the thing.
I’ve been living off bachelor chow and sangwiches for far too long. Too lazy, is my problem. I had a really good couple of months, back in ‘97, where I was cooking for myself every night, like a normal person. Omlettes, risottos, rubbery “steaks” of reformed pork filth. Sloo!
I need to start a cult. Get them to cook for me.
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