About food

I enjoy my food. In fact I’m a little suspicious of people who don’t.

Of course I should preface what I’m about to write by recognizing that there are many people in this world confronted with starvation, so anything I say may sound flippant. However, “About being here” is about life as I experience it. As an affluent Westerner I am in the privileged position of being able to take the availability of food for granted. So for me food is a question not of survival but of choice.

I reached the view at quite a young age that the secret to enjoying life is first of all to enjoy the basic functions of life. First among these of course is eating. If you can arrange to eat well and enjoy your food, then that is an important step towards enjoying life. Most of the time I can choose what I eat, mainly because I eat most of my meals at home and when I eat out I’m usually somewhere where the food is good. In fact it’s quite rare that I feel I have eaten badly. Indeed I sometimes say, “Life is too short to eat crap”. I certainly spend no more than 10% of my income on food and drink, so there seems to be little point in skimping. That doesn’t mean that I am forever indulging expensive tastes, rather that I believe it’s worth paying a bit extra for better quality.

I would regard my diet as healthy. On the rare occasions I consume something to excess my body immediately demands that I compensate by being more frugal the next few days. If I have been taking a lot of exercise it demands a bigger intake. I just follow my natural instincts, I believe in neither forcing myself nor resisting my desires. I think my body is good at regulating itself, I am generally in good health and my weight remains stable. I am instinctively drawn to balanced food choices. It just happens to be what I like.
I frequently have a voracious appetite, which is viewed with envy by people who put on weight easily . But I don’t actually eat the same things that they eat. I do exercise a fair bit and I have also the following explanation as to why my body demands so much food: I once saw a BBC animal documentary that explained that an orang-utan expends 40% of its energy (and therefore food consumption) on merely keeping it’s brain running - so just think how much energy I need!

The business of food takes up quite a large part of our daily life. First of all there is the shopping, then the preparing, only then the eating together and finally the clearing up afterwards. Even if you eat out there is often the sitting about waiting. If you add it all up that’s quite a big chunk out of every day; so it better be good.

There are two very important aspects to eating. Perhaps even more important than the quality of the food itself, there is the sharing of food. I find few things sadder than eating alone, however good the food is. At home we have always insisted that the main meal of the day, usually in the evening, be taken together. This sharing of food is a fundamental moment in human society. Originally, in subsistence communities, it required joint work to produce and prepare food and the natural consequence was then to eat that food together. This is why Christianty, which has borrowed so many of its key images from the pagans before it, makes Communion so central to its rituals. The family meal is a natural moment of sharing and is at the heart of the human experience.

If truth be told, in our household Clara does more on the food front than I do. She does most of the shopping, but we do enjoy going to our local market together on Saturday morning if we have nothing else on. It has now moved back onto Place Flagey (now the works have finished) after several glorious years of being alongside the lakes, a much prettier venue in my opinion. I’ve always loved a real market. When I lived in Toulouse I did pretty well all my food shopping at the market which was held six days a week on the side of one of the boulevards. The sheer physicality of the food on display in a market is a joy - the sight, the smells, the touch (if they let you!). It’s great to follow the seasons and to compare stalls which is the true spirit of a market as used as a term in economics. Wherever I travel I like to visit a local food market (Barcelona, Riga, Istanbul have some good ones in recent memory).
We stroll down to ours on foot and buy mainly fruit and vegetables, but also anything else that catches our fancy, cheeses, bread, Italian specialities and more. I need to say at this point that we buy very little processed food and tend to cook ourselves from raw ingredients. The locally grown organic greens at the market are particularly good. I’m not an organic fanatic, I’ve worked in too many regulatory committee meetings on organic food to believe in paying unduly over the odds for all manner of fancily packaged goods at the supermarket just because they have a “bio” label. However, I like to buy naturally and locally grown stuff as it tastes objectively better and has a more satisfying texture.

I don’t cook as often as Clara does, but I do at least twice a week. We also have Mme Jacobs to do some meals. When I do cook, I like to shop for my own ingredients as that’s a large part of the fun and I may only decide on the menu in the light of what looks good. I usually take charge of the Sunday roast and the Friday evening fish. It also seems natural (as it appears to be a male thing) that I tend the barbecue in the summer. Having lived with an Italian for over two decades I knock out a pretty mean pasta too.
When I did youth camps I used to direct, from the chopping board and stove, cooking for forty people or more, so it’s not something I worry about. I find cooking, admittedly when not done too often, a therapeutic and relaxing manual activity which produces a result that can be enjoyed together. I have some loud-speakers rigged up in the kitchen to listen to music whilst at it. We have a basic rule in our household that the one who hasn’t prepared the meal clears up. I think the division of labour is reasonably fair.
I’m lucky in that Clara likes cooking and is good at it. She tends to experiment more than me. We have fairly similar tastes, inevitably so I suppose, having eaten together for so long. I guess you’d call the dominant style at home Italian/French. I mainly learned to cook by helping friends in their kitchens in France. Belgian cooking (that’s Mme Jacobs) is really a version of French. We favour a fairly simple approach, letting the ingredients speak for themselves.
Olive oil features fairly prominently. At present we have some on the go that we brought back from Croatia pressed the old way from the olives of our hosts on Hvar.
I went off too much butter and cream in cooking after I had hepatitis in 1989; my liver just didn’t feel like them any more. I actually have never liked milk by itself. I was put off it for life by the third pint bottles we were forced to drink at school as kids in England. In the winter the milk had ice flakes in it and in the summer rather nasty floaters. My friendship with Lari started in primary school because he would drink it for me. On the other hand I adore cheese in pretty well most forms.

The culinary landscape in England has changed radically since I was a boy. I get particularly annoyed with escpecially French people who continue to think that you can’t get a good meal in England. That’s just not true these days. However, back in the 60’s and 70s it was pretty dire. I was fortunate in that my mother only arrived in England from the East in her teens, so she never had much time for “traditional” English cooking. We always ate very well at home and visiting friends were sometimes shocked by the rather cosmopolitan dishes on offer. I don’t remember any coercion about eating, it was regarded as something to be enjoyed and as I got older I gradually progressed onto a wider range of tastes. My father never cooked (nor did I), but when he felt mum deserved a break he would take us out to a restaurant.
When I first moved away from home I lived in the countryside in the Gers in the South-West of France. The cooking there was wonderful and quite unpretentious. Here I first experienced meals that could last for up to four hours and long conversations at table about....food.
Afterwards, when a student, eating in Hall at Christ Church, despite the grand surroundings and great company, was from the point of view of the food itself truly abysmal, but I returned sufficiently often home and to France so as not to mind too much.
It was when living for a year in Germany that I got so fed up with the repetitive fare that I actually started to cook for myself in the light of what I had observed in France.
Since then I’ve really come to enjoy it and become gradually more proficient. The kitchen is the biggest and most important room in our house. It’s also where we eat, so those at the table are aware of the preparation of food.

Apart from when we’re on holiday, we don’t tend to go out to restaurants much, even if there’s no shortage of good ones in Brussels and plenty within walking distance. I guess we are happy to stay at home having been out at work most of the day. In the summer we eat outside on our terrace as often as possible (not that that counts for so many days in the year!). I also have to eat out at restaurants when away for work and at some meetings we are served the same food as those we work for (especially ministerial lunches where the wine tends to be good). It’s true that after a run of restaurant-style food it’s nice to have something simpler at home. Restaurants never serve enough vegetables and fresh fruit in my experience.
When we do eat out together it’s surprising how often Clara and I spontaneously choose the same dish. After we may agree to try two different things and swap half way through. The real interest in eating in a restarant is after all to try things that we don’t know how to make or can’t be bothered to go through the effort to prepare ourselves. That”s also the big interest of course in ethnic restaurants. When in another country I try to eat local, but admit in some countries to having been so bored with the food after a week, I’ve resorted to foreign restaurants.

I’ve always been unable to answer the question “what is your favourite dish?” or at least since I was about nine. It’s just too reductive. Variety is the spice of life. It’s great to eat different things and that is the key to a balanced diet.
Regards the other question: “is there any food you don’t like?” my habitual answer is “tripe”. I can’t think of anything more repulsive. I was last confronted with some in Spain a few years back when Jo, who is Flemish, had mistakenly heard “callo” as “gallo”. This was forgiveable given the thick accent of the dishevelled landlord in this seedy tapas bar in a real hick town in central Spain. Jo thought he was ordering chicken. But it was tripe. I valliantly tried to eat some. The first mouthful refused to go down and shot straight back out of my throat. Gross! - fortunately we were sitting outside.

So what do I eat?
I shall attempt to approach this scientifically in broad categories.
I believe anyone who does a reasonable amount of physical activity should eat lots of carbohydrates as that’s the basic fuel for the body. I eat plenty of bread, preferably brown but I enjoy a crispy fresh baguette. As in France and Italy there is always bread on our table and it is handy for finishing off a good sauce.
I eat a huge amount of pasta which can be prepared in an infinite number of ways (“pesto, matriciana, ragù, tonno, zucchini, salmone” to name the more common ones at home). Then there’s potatoes in their many forms: new ones in their skins, chopped small in with the roast and less often large baked ones or home-made mash - and of course chips, when out. I love rice and eat it every day without any problem when in Asia, but at home perhaps not so often, either in risotto or basmati. I don’t like maize so much and eat polenta under sufferance.

As for protein, I don’t eat vast quantities of meat and certainly don’t insist on it at every meal, but I do enjoy a good piece of red meat in roasts, steaks, and chops; liver; poultry (stuffed quail with grapes is one of my signature dishes); game in a good sauce; ham cooked and cured; sausages if not too fatty etc - all available from our excellent butcher round the corner at la Royale.
I eat fish at least twice a week and more often at the seaside. I’m particularly fond of it grilled or done in the oven, most often at home it’s bream or bass but sometimes other fish. Seafood is more of a treat, eaten less regularly. I love a lobster but can live without oysters. A generous fish stew, paella or pasta alla scogliera are among my favourites.
I’ve already mentioned I eat lots of cheese. As an Englishman I have an abiding liking for tangy mature cheddar and Wensleydale, but I also love goat’s cheese, feta, Roquefort, Morbier, Comté, Parmesan and many more - anything with a bit of taste really.

Vegetables should be present in generous quantities at any main meal and not cooked to death so they retain their texture (steaming and stir-frying are handy). Peppers, courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes (ratatouille and peperonata); carrots; beans (especially green), pulses generally (lentils, chick peas), brassica a bit less (broccoli is fine, cabbage ok stuffed); onions and garlic frequently when preparing dishes, leeks; fennel; leafy stuff, spinach, chicory (popular in Belgium as “chicons”) etc etc, There’s so much to enjoy (I don’t like beetroot though). Let us not forget the joy of raw veg in salads too, all the different kinds of lettuce and rocket. I should make a special mention of mushrooms which we like to pick wild in season (boletus mainly), then fry lightly in olive oil with garlic and parsley.

I also eat lots of fruit: apples and pears (fine with cheese); citrus (oranges, clementines, grapefruit - I even ate lemons as a child); prunus (peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums and especially cherries); berries (strawberries, raspberries, bilberries, blackberries); grapes (I remeber my first real grape in France - the intense perfume of muscat, quite unlike anything I’d experienced as a child in England); melons (cavaillon, honeydew, water); tropical fruit (pineapple, mangoes, bananas, papaya). Freshly made fruit salad is fine too. I think it’s good to respect the seasonality of fruit, if only because it simplifies the choice.
Fruit is especialy beautiful to look at with its bright colours and round forms. It’s not surprising that it’s a favourite choice for artists when painting still lives. That’s why I’ve chosen fruit to illustrate this piece.
Let’s not forget nuts here (just peanuts, but better pistacchios, cashews, wallnuts).

If it’s not just fruit then I enjoy simple home made cakes for desserts. I like to make crumbles myself. I always prefer a little vanilla ice cream on the side to real cream. I’m also quite partial to the Eastern Mediterranean baklava and the like (I always bring a box-full back with me from the countries where it is a speciality). Chocolate, a great Belgian institution must also be mentioned here (Godiva, Marcolini and just plain Cöte d’Or).

I always make a point of having a decent breakfast and a large one if there’s any risk of lunch not appearing till the middle of the afternoon (in Spain, up a mountain, in some meetings). I like to vary it but often it’s a combination of cereals, dairy product and fruit: toast, butter and jam; bread, feta and tomatoes; porridge made with milk (great in the winter or before climbing a mountain) flavoured with cinammon and honey and a freshly squeezed orange juice on the side; muesli with milk with some fresh fruit chopped into it. When away at a hotel with a good buffet breakfast, I enjoy having something of everything.
I tend to prefer my lunch light and usually cycle home to eat it. It may be just cheese or cold cuts with a salad, or a soup in winter. Sometimes there are left-overs from yesterday’s dinner. Incidentally, we’re great believers in recycling left-overs and not wasting anything - it’s somehow disrespectful to throw away food.. If I have too much at lunch I need a siesta, which is extremely pleasant and a feature of my holidays, but a bad plan if I have to work in the afternoon. If I don’t come home I often make do with just a sandwich.
Dinner is usually my main meal and one I like to take time over. I like to accompany it with wine. Unless we’re entertaining it’s usually a two course affair, a main, which could be for example meat or fish with a carbo and a veg, or a large pasta or risotto and a simple dessert, which could be just fruit. If I’m hungry I lay into the cheese before the dessert.

In short, I eat pretty well everything (apart from tripe) and seek variety, but expect my food to be well prepared from quality ingredients. In this way I enjoy my food and that helps me feel pretty good about life in general.