No substitute for flavour of a handmade life
|Published
"I enjoy cooking. I'm not particularly good at it, but I think it's a peaceful pastime, and a civilised one too." "I enjoy cooking. I'm not particularly good at it, but I think it's a peaceful pastime, and a civilised one too."
I enjoy cooking. I'm not particularly good at it, but I think it's a peaceful pastime, and a civilised one too.
There's something sociable about making food and sharing it with friends and family. Much of civilised life happens round the dining table. My kitchen's my comfort zone - my happy place. Home-cooked food is personal and unique.
It may not be as perfect as shop-bought food, but it shows you thought about it, took trouble with it, and cared about the people you'd be sharing it with. Supermarkets offer an almost endless selection of pies, soups, quiches and pasta dishes, all cooked to perfection in a factory and each the same as the others.
Your home-baked chicken pie is slightly different each time and may sometimes be a tad over-cooked, or a touch too salty, but it's personal and represents a message of friendship. It says: “I made this specially for you.” Sadly, more and more of my friends are finding it just too much trouble to cook meals from scratch.
Why go to all that trouble of peeling, chopping, stirring and mixing, and end up with a sink-full of dirty dishes, when you can get a ready-made chicken and mushroom pie, pop it in the microwave oven and serve it in five minutes without even getting your hands sticky?
Added to all this is the fact that our electricity and water bills are now so high it costs more to produce a home-cooked meal than it does to buy a pie. So why schlep? This attitude is creeping into many facets of modern life and we're the poorer for it. I have recently attended some delightful stage productions by very talented theatre groups.
Months of hard work go into rehearsing, staging and lighting plays and then the theatre ends up less than half full. People have become lazy and spoiled.
Why go out on a chilly night to watch a play that may not be world-class when you can slouch at home in an old track-suit and see professional actors in a DVD on your flat-screen TV? The problem with modern, pre-packaged life is that it all becomes the same. No matter where you go or who you're with, you see the same entertainment, drink the same drinks and eat the same professionally produced foods. Our lives gradually shrink into a tiny pre-programmed cocoon.
Someone else is living our lives for us. I don't want this to happen to me. I want life to be handmade rather than mass-produced. It just seems more interesting that way.
Last Laugh
A fastidious diner called the waiter over and asked: “How do you prepare your chickens?” “We don't do anything special, really,” said the waiter. “We just tell them they're going to die.”
* "Tavern of the Seas" is a daily column written in the Cape Argus by David Biggs. Biggs can be contacted at dbiggs@glolink.co.za
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.