by Jay Rayner
The problem was that, until 2012, nobody imported it into Britain. I wrote once about how I had taste-tested seventeen white-wine vinegars to find something to match Kressi for when our supply ran out, as it always did. I found nothing like it. Once, for a stunt, I flew to Geneva just to buy vinegar, and found the whole city was closed. I had visited on Pentecost, the sort of religious holiday only the Swiss would ever take seriously. (I flew home with an empty bag.) I came to associate the flavour of that vinegar with Denise, with a certain good taste in everything from food to music and art. The right piece of Elgar could make her weep. She made a point of giving me fabulous Swiss chocolate for my birthday, and introduced me to the joys of classic cheese fondues to be eaten un-ironically. In Denise’s life a fondue was a serious business, rather than some joke or anachronism from the seventies. It was all about the wine and the correct volume of salty powerful Gruyère to waxy, dull Emmenthal. Fondues were eaten standing up, each of us reaching in with our forks and desperate not to lose our bread to the depths.
Denise’s later years were not easy. Chronic back problems became increasingly severe until she was essentially crippled, housebound, and dependent on visits by carers, though she was remarkably sanguine; she hungered more for news of her children and grandchildren rather than the chance to complain about what she was suffering. And she was suffering. We knew this. From Denise’s perspective, old age was absolutely no fun at all and became increasingly less so.
The call during our holiday was to say that Denise had been admitted to hospital with pneumonia. She died there in the early hours, a couple of days later, with her eldest daughter at her bedside. We packed our bags and headed home for the funeral.
In north-west London my mother had made a stumbling sort of progress. She had escaped the ICU to a single room with a view of the trees, where she complained about the haphazard care from a changing roster of agency nurses. For a while, infected by the most virulent of bugs, she was shifted into a small isolation room at the local hospital and became angrier and angrier. She was, I think, going a little bit crazy, hemmed in from all sides, with no sight of recovery obvious, the usual punctuations of mealtimes made irrelevant by lack of appetite. Eventually, through sheer will, through sheer bloody-mindedness, she convinced everybody to let her go home; to at least be in a hospital bed in her own bedroom in the house that she loved, and with Des, her husband of fifty-three years, nearby. Here, for a little while, she found a certain peace and calm, though it seemed to all of us that she’d had enough. She no longer wished to cooperate with the physios who were trying to get her up and about. She could no longer see the point. So what if I never walk again? she said once. It just wasn’t going to happen.
An infection hit. She was carted off to the private wing of the hospital whose ICU she had occupied a few years before. She agonized over this, felt it was not in keeping with her absolute commitment to the NHS, but she also knew a public ward was impractical. Claire Rayner was just too well known; on the occasions she had been on those wards nurses had been forced to spend more time keeping well-meaning well-wishers at bay than actually nursing. And anyway she wanted – hell, she deserved – privacy. Previously when she had been in hospital, the tabloids had been desperate to get hold of the story. We were determined it wouldn’t play out like that. These last days were quiet, as infection began to close her down. The kindnesses we could show were increasingly small. One morning I was with her and she told me that more than anything else she craved fresh orange juice. The bright, crisp tang of freshly squeezed orange juice. That was all. The ward had told her there was no way they could squeeze oranges for her. As it happened, downstairs in the hospital shop they sold bottles of the stuff. I brought some up. She drank deep and for the morning at least, perhaps simply bolstered by the hit of fructose, rallied slightly.
But gently, after that, she began to slip away. One Sunday evening in October her consultant announced that there were decisions to be taken. The rest of my family moved off to another room for a case conference; I stayed with Claire to keep her company. She wanted to know if she was dying and I was as honest with her as I could be. At that point nothing was certain but it didn’t look great. We fell to talking about last words, the way they were never as good as we might wish. Famously the last words of King George V when he died in 1936 had been recorded as ‘bugger Bognor’. Something like that, we agreed, would not do. I suggested a reference to the NHS, under increasing threat of cuts by the relatively new Conservative–Lib Dem government. Together we formulated the words.
Her consultant returned. Her kidneys were failing. What? Both of them? she asked. Yes. She said, ‘Double fuck.’ We laughed. There were two possibilities. Either she could have a last stab at dialysis, which might give the kidneys a little space in which to recover, or they could simply keep her comfortable and let the inevitable happen. We thought she would go for the latter. She had been through so much, been so angry and distressed and miserable. As ever, Claire surprised us. She would not go gentle. She opted for the dialysis.
She died quietly the next evening at a little past seven. We managed to sit on the news until early the next morning, revealing then that she had wanted her last words to be recorded as, ‘Tell David Cameron that if he screws up my beloved NHS I’ll come back and bloody haunt him.’ They became the headline on the story of her death and two days later were used as a question to the Prime Minister in the House of Commons. What, the Tory MP Margot James asked, was Mr Cameron’s response? On the opposition benches, while she spoke, the Labour MPs howled at the Prime Minister like ghouls. Cameron declared he had nothing but respect for my mother, which was not the same thing as promising to protect the health service.
Of course, Claire was a lifelong atheist. She was certain there was no hereafter and certainly nowhere for her to haunt the Prime Minister from. Except in the digital age, almost anything is possible. In the months and years that have followed, Claire’s last words have become a rallying cry; they have turned up on placards during demonstrations, been referred to in speeches. And even now if you search Twitter under ‘Claire Rayner’ you are most likely to find some reference to them, usually with a simple question to David Cameron over how he’s sleeping at night with my mother’s ghost in hot pursuit. Even she would recognize that it really is a kind of haunting, social-media style.
To describe the humanist funeral as a quiet affair would be to misrepresent the torrent of hilarious, often filthy anecdote that filled the crematorium that afternoon. One image will stay with me: my brother, Adam, placing on the edge of the pulpit, as a prop, that wooden carving of a cock which Claire had received in the post so many decades before. It was, the humanist celebrant said during her address, the only funeral she had presided over where the word ‘cunnilingus’ had been used. There was a context, but let’s just let it hang there so your imagination can run wild.
Afterwards we returned to my parents’ house to mark her passing in the only way my family understood: with a luscious tea catered for us by her favourite local Italian restaurant. There was bubbly. There was chatter. There was laughter.
It was the sort of party Claire used to love; it was the only one she could not attend.
The funeral of my mother-in-law, Denise, had taken place just a few weeks before. It was an altogether quieter but equally sweet occasion, as we pushed back the memories of the pain and discomfort she had endured in her latter years to recall the woman we had all adored. Afterwards we went back to her home and the serious work began: hunks of Gruyère were grated into bowls, followed by even bigger blocks of Emmenthal. The two ceramic pots were rubbed with cut cloves of garlic and then filled with white wine, to be heated gently on the stove. At the dining table another team set to work sawing up French sticks into manageable-sized pieces of bread. The cheese was added, the stirring began and with it the familiar hubbub over whether it was thickening properly. Did it need more salt? Was now the time to introduce a teaspoon of cornflour to each, beaten i
nto a glass of kirsch? We had been doing all this for decades. Each time we had asked ourselves the same questions. The questioning was a part of the ritual.
The burners were lit, the steaming pots brought to the table, and quickly the daffodil-yellow pools of melted cheese began a slow pop and boil. And so the tribe gathered, the evidence of a long life, fully lived: there were Denise’s three children and their partners; the grandchildren, some of them now grown up so they in turn could be there with her great grandchildren. We skewered hunks of bread and crowded around, some of us turning shoulder in to make a little more space. Denise may have begun her life in Switzerland but we were a very long way from there now. We were in a tidy bungalow on a tidy housing estate not far from the town of Stourbridge in that part of the West Midlands known as the Black Country, the deep, rolling accents of which could be heard around the table. But a single piece of food culture had managed to sustain and renew that link to Switzerland; it was a reminder of what united us, what bound us together.
We skewered pieces of bread on our long forks, and plunged them into the cheese with the usual teasing and jostling directed at making one of our number lose theirs and risk a forfeit. But somehow we all brought the bread up intact and raised our forks. Other families remember their loved ones with the clink of glass on glass and the alcoholic burst of whisky or wine. Not this family. We toasted Denise with the ends of our fondue forks and the thick, slow drip of fabulous, boozy cheese. It was the only thing that made any sense to us.
11.
A NEW GASTRONOMICS
I am still a greedy bastard.
And I still can’t lie about it, even for the sake of appearances.
I can, however, take a little comfort from the fact that I am not alone. We are all greedy bastards now. From time to time policy makers talk intensely about the need for people in the West to alter their patterns of consumption. We need to eat less meat and dairy, less fat and sugar; we need more vegetables, more fibre. We need to be able to see our feet. All of this is true, even though I have really horrible feet. I would happily live without ever seeing them again. Up until a couple of years ago we were given these dietary instructions based solely on soaring levels of obesity and associated conditions like Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Now we are given them, not just because we’re worried about getting fat, but because in the near future there may not be enough food to go round.
Unfortunately, attacking the issue based solely on Western patterns of consumption is missing the point. Even if America and Western Europe introduced massive and unprecedented changes to their diet – and some of that will happen out of economic necessity – that would still leave a vastly greater population in countries like China, India, Indonesia and Brazil scoffing all the meat-heavy, gravy-slicked, dairy-rich pies. Then again, this complication does rather come with the territory. For at the heart of too much that is said in the mass media about the problems in our global food system lies a big fat lie. That lie is simplicity. We are constantly told that it’s all very simple: that if you want to do the right thing all you need do is follow a few simple rules.
Eat this, not that. Buy this, not that. Shun them, embrace those.
It is not simple. It is never simple. Anybody who tells you otherwise is fooling you. Worse still, they are probably fooling themselves. Reading books or newspaper articles or watching television programmes by chefs and food campaigners can be an exhausting, dispiriting business. They barrel from what appears to be one intensely ethical, perfectly made, morally unquestionable lifestyle choice to another. They source – nobody shops for food any more – their lunch from that lovely chap just down the road, who keeps only seven pigs and knows them all by name, and holds them dear, until the time comes to give them an aromatherapy massage, crank up the Vivaldi, and slaughter them under general anaesthetic. They eat only what the season is bountiful enough to supply. They till their own land by hand, share their gluts with their dear neighbours, and don’t even know where the nearest supermarket is, let alone ever visit it.
Put aside the suspicion that it’s a put-up job; that nobody really lives like this. Even if they do, it’s not really surprising. They have built their entire careers out of doing so, constructed a persona that allows and requires it. Sourcing their food rather than just getting the shop in isn’t simply what they do. It’s who they are, and they are paid to do it. You, meanwhile, have a proper job, and kids to look after, and the bills to pay, and God knows money’s too tight to mention. Who the hell are they to lecture you?
Oh, and one other thing: as we now know, a lot of what they’ve been telling you is simply wrong.
So, what have we learned?
1. Supermarkets are NOT evil.
2. Though, of course, they are also VERY EVIL INDEED.
3. Caring about how things taste, being obsessive about seasonality, perving over top-quality ingredients, rubbing yourself against the glossy pages of a Nigella Lawson cookbook: all of that is completely fine. But …
4. … it’s not the same as supporting sustainable agriculture.
5. Local food is not all that. Except …
6. … when it happens to be.
7. And if localism is far less important and food miles too simplistic a measure, then eating imported ingredients out of season isn’t necessarily a big moral issue any more. In fact …
8. … not all food imports are the devil’s work. Some of them are the solution.
9. Farmers’ markets are brilliant places. As are Ferrari showrooms, and glossy shops selling Chanel handbags. If you’ve got the cash, go right ahead. Knock yourself out. (I know I do.)
10. Organic food makes a pretty feeble argument for itself.
11. Big agriculture isn’t all nasty, evil and dangerous and awful and unspeakable. Indeed …
12. … some big agriculture is necessary.
13. Turning our backs on biotechnology because it’s, y’know, weird and involves science and people in white coats and nothing good can ever come from any of that is really, really dumb. Because a lot of people in the world do not have access to enough food.
14. We do need to eat less meat.
15. There’s no such thing as natural and unnatural, so we need to find new words.
16. Biofuels are total bollocks.
17. All this stuff is ear-bleedingly, eyeball-gougingly complicated.
Yes, it is. It’s why at various points in this book you may have spotted me contradicting myself. Bad Jay. Guilty as charged. On one page I argue that we need to increase the volume of apples – of everything, frankly – that is grown in Britain and Europe generally. On another page I say that the most sustainable option may well be stuff grown in New Zealand and shipped halfway around the world to us.
There is a reason for that: we live in a dirty and flawed world. In a clean and perfect world, with a truly perfect market, each country on the planet would exploit its environmental competitive advantage to grow the foodstuffs they are best suited to growing, with the lowest possible carbon footprint. All that food would then flow about the planet from places of surplus to places of deficit. Everybody would be fed. Sadly, because both that perfect world and perfect market do not exist, it doesn’t work like that. Lamb, apples and dairy products produced in New Zealand may well have the smallest carbon footprint as a result of the country’s ideal climate and landscape. Europe, however, is finding it harder and harder to buy them because the deformed business model of its supermarkets means consumers have become used to not paying enough for food. The rising economic might of China and India is cutting us out of the deals. We are moving further and further towards the back of the queue. We are becoming the poor relations.
Meanwhile the certainties are collapsing. Local food really may be great for local economies and therefore for the health of the communities that produce it. That has to be a good thing. Likewise, farmers’ markets may well be lovely places full of top produce, which can provide small farmers with a living. As I’ve already
said, I love a good farmers’ market. But that is not the same as local food and farmers’ markets being the most sustainable model. And just to make things even more complicated there will, of course, be some things grown locally to you or sold in farmers’ markets that actually do happen to be the most sustainable. Finally there is the very idea of a fully sustainable food production system. As Professor Tim Benton put it to me, it is like happiness or intellectual fulfilment. It is, he said, ‘an aim, not an actuality’; it is something we will constantly strive for and journey towards without ever completely reaching.
See. It’s anything but simple. It’s complicated. What, in God’s name, is to be done?
As I said at the very outset, we need to embrace a new economic model around our food, one which is flexible and non-doctrinal. At its heart must be one idea: sustainability. I still think ‘gastronomics’ is a stupid word, but it’s my word, and until someone else comes up with something better it will have to do. It does at least bring together an interest in aesthetics – the greedy business of how it all tastes – with the issues around cost, production and environmental impact.
A lot of it comes down to hard cash, certainly from a British perspective – although the same principles apply in any country or culture governed by a strong supermarket sector. In the short term British supermarkets must simply start paying their suppliers more. That will enable farmers to invest in agriculture so, in turn, our food self-sufficiency can start to rise again. When I accused the supermarkets publicly of not doing this the British Retail Consortium, the trade body which acts as apologist-in-chief for the major food retailers, threw a report at me from May 2012 called ‘Retail and Farming: Investing in Our Futures’. Boy, is that a fun read. It piously lists all the grants supermarkets have made to universities and trade bodies to help fund research into things like water and energy usage, the improvement of yield, carbon footprint reduction, and so on. For example, it included the thrilling fact that the Co-op makes an annual grant of £10,000 to one college to help study water management. Ten grand? Ten bloody grand? These are retail companies with turnovers of billions. Tesco alone makes an estimated £6,000 profit every minute. Even a few million pounds’ worth of research grants is nothing compared with paying farmers enough so they can actually stay in business and expand. And, of course, all of these research initiatives put the onus on the food producers to improve their efficiency so they can better cope with the moment when the retailers roundly screw them on the deal.