Another thing: Wasting your hungry
I tried to write something fun but then remembered the Tories.
Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, though, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.
Years ago, a friend said something that I’ve never been able to get out of my head. We were deciding what takeaway we should get and she expressed her anxiety about ‘wasting her hungry’. Her fear was that, having built up that hunger, she’d eat something she didn’t like and, although she’d be full, she’d be sad at having eaten something shit.
In one sense, it’s a life affirming idea. Why shouldn’t every meal bring happiness? Eating is one of the simpler pleasures this horrible world has to offer. Food is something we rightly celebrate. It’s intrinsic to our understanding of culture and difference and, as my friend Cat explores in her writing, food is also wound up in complex ways with memory, nostalgia, and selfhood. Much of my social life is built around eating and, thanks to my recent enthusiasm for cooking, much of my personality.
And I don’t think I’m alone. Think of the seemingly undiminishing appeal of TV shows like Great British Bake Off or Masterchef. These shows persist, in part, thanks to a sense that food is a universal or unifying force. We all eat, after all. Everyone can make a cake, everyone can teach themselves to cook. With just a few simple ingredients, you too can whip up a puttanesca in 15 minutes.
But of course there’s another conversation to have about food in this county. Yes there are plenty of pricks like me: robustly middle class hipsters with a favourite neighbourhood small plates place and three different kinds of cooking salt. But there are also a lot people for whom the concept of ‘wasting your hungry’ is an unimaginable privilege, people who are literally eating to survive, relying on foodbanks and making impossible daily decisions about which essential resource they can go without.
I almost didn't finish writing this newsletter for that reason. I had intended to use the concept of 'wasting your hungry' as an amusing way in to talk about food and how it impacts my life. As I started writing, though, I immediately started to feel weird and stopped because it seemed callous to write all about my favourite restaurants when other people are starving. The idea that you can waste your hunger is patently offensive to people who can’t afford to satisfy theirs.
But actually, ignoring that would be worse. I decided to push on with writing precisely because this is an inherent tension in our society and an inevitable consequence of capitalism: that being a “foodie” can be a legitimate cornerstone of a persons personality while people two streets away are starving. As a one-time student of humanitarianism, I can bang on for ages about global food inequality and the need for collaboration on international distribution. But as a current student of being a wanker, I can also give you a recommendation for a restaurant that does a great chicken liver parfait.
This is a tension that can’t be easily reconciled, but that needs to be owned and discussed. It's very easy and perfectly legitimate to drag champagne socialists over their hypocrisy but, at the same time, it’s not going to change anything. And more to the point, it's exactly what our current government want people to do. That's why they spent last week’s conference resorting to dog whistles about "luxury beliefs", blaming wealthy liberals for the hardships of the poor, all the while overseeing an unprecedented erosion of human and working rights, fanning the flames of xenophobia and transphobia, presiding over collapsing healthcare and asylum systems, and trying to distance themselves from their own record of failure.
The cause of food inequality (and inequality more generally) is not a “privileged woke minority” with luxury beliefs. The cause is more than a decade of considered and explicit policymaking at the hands of cynics, careerists, and small state ideologues. The cause is a gaggle of politicians who truly believe that poor people are only poor because they’re not ambitious enough. The cause is a political party who would sooner see people starve than tax the rich just in case their mates give them earful next time they check in to their members club.
None of this is to mean there isn’t a conversation to have about privilege; I’m not here trying to defend the middle classes or excuse my luxuriant eating habits. I fully recognise my own privilege. I’m willing to own my part in an unequal society and to try and do something to correct it. Our elected leaders, meanwhile, despite their staggering personal wealth, are trying to weaponise the idea of privilege to deflect from any serious conversation or intervention to tackle inequity in this country. It’s yet another salvo in a manufactured culture war designed to paper over the cracks of their incompetent and corrupt government, and the only way to move past it is to move past them.
Christ where did that come from? I really really really came on here to write something light hearted today but, hey-ho, it’s conference season. Fuck the Tories.
Cultural indigestion
What’s on the box.
Watching: My partner hurt her back a few days ago, so we spent the best part of a week watching Vanderpump Rules and I can honestly say that season 10 is one of the most exciting bits of television I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately I do think it’s all about the journey so you’ll have to invest at least 100 hours into the show if you want to get the full impact.
Reading: I really enjoyed Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series so I thought I would give one of his more recent novels a go - The Morning Star. A mixed bag. It’s at its best when it’s just Knausgaard doing Knausgaard (grumpy old pseudo-intellectual tells you everything he’s buying in a supermarket) but it tries to introduce nine different voices and the further they deviate from his actual life and experiences, the less convincing they become. There are also countless loose ends which would be very organic in a memoir but are quite frustrating in a novel. Oh and it ends with like a 50 page essay about death and just cba with it. 6/10.
Listening: