Salad Days: Penguin Special by Scott Ronnie

Author:Scott Ronnie
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780857978202
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Four

Steven Poole suggests that food is ‘the last ingestible substance you can indulge in with fanatical obsessiveness without being frowned upon . . . a safer and more respectable hedonistic tool [than ecstasy], the key to a comfortingly domesticised high.’ This feels so right: so few indulgences look good laid out in the home. Hence the confluence of food porn with the Facebook ‘glamour effect’, a symptom of using social media to finesse our day-to-day travails and thus contribute to a false array of perfect-looking lives. Unlike our smokes, our drugs, our literal pornographies, our food can be enjoyed with pride, then documented and displayed.

And yet the mood of a meal, the wake of the gastronomy – the taste, the light and, yes, the mouth-feel – these intangibles stand out in a world where everything is endlessly exhibitable, in a world where things are less likely to be felt than shown. I came to understand this, plainly and clearly, through proximity to perhaps the most singular meal of all – the meal most likely to meet anyone’s criteria for ‘enough’. A year after beginning the longest summer of our lives, my boyfriend was given the chance to fly back to Barcelona and, from there, drive to elBulli and eat a thirty-five-course meal in the last season the restaurant would be open. He later wrote, unwillingly, a piece about the meal for an issue of the magazine I edited at the time. ‘Should I really write about going to elBulli?’ he began, a note of protest that persisted throughout the piece.

‘I didn’t go to elBulli to boast about it,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve met friends of friends who know me as “that guy who went to a restaurant in Spain for the weekend”, and six months later I still don’t know how to respond to the inevitable question: “So how was it?” I’ve never brought it up with my family. I know that it’s extravagant, lush, whatever.

‘More than anything,’ he wrote, ‘I went to satisfy my own curiosity: How does the actualisation of an experience that is both so widely documented and so unattainable that it borders on the mythical actually weigh up? I try to characterise it as the same way people feel when they see a famous work of art, or the first time they get high, or the first time they kiss with their mouth open. The lifting of something known to the position of something experienced is at once both exactly what you expect it to be, and overwhelmingly strange.’ While I’d never dine at elBulli – now, nobody would – I understood the sensation that was meant.

To explain this, I think of a story by Lydia Davis wherein a student is asked to name the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitates for a long time, then at last smiles with embarrassment and says ‘his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

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