Dave Reeder: A tribute

The bemused look on Dave Reeder's face as he poses alongside a permanently preening Paris Hilton epitomises the man. Entirely unimpressed by celebrity for its own sake, he was far happier when interviewing chefs, discussing food and wine, and laughing uproariously with friends.

It came as a shock to wake up this morning to the news that Dave had died. And it was not as if he died in the last day or so - in this online age, we tend to learn about the passing of friends and family quickly. But, in a final tragic irony for a man who was a copious communicator and prolific writer, it turns out that he died last November and the news only filtered through to many of us in the past 24 hours.

In the last couple of years of Dave's life, he was struggling with health issues, with having to put aside plans to retire to France and instead live in his late parents' house in Devon, and with trying to rationalise his possessions which had filled every room, but he was still Dave. Facebook is deviously good at making people feel like they are not alone - for Dave, it was a place for him to update everyone on the minutiae of his life, as well as his thoughts on the state of the world and his strong opinions on food, as he lived alone in a cold house, where mountains of unsorted boxes were preventing him from bleeding the radiators.

But in between massive overshares about his assorted medical conditions (some of us are still recovering from his "arse tags" revelation...), the essential Dave was still there online, reporting from the house in Chagford or the village pub, defending his pescatarianism, expressing his sorrow at the terror attacks in Paris, despairing at the hell of ready-meals and people who can't cook, flying the flag for atheism, reporting on cheese and wine combinations, getting involved in spirited online debates.

And that was Dave at his best - the bemused raconteur with plenty to say. This morning, I thought back to meeting him for the first time. We were both working in Dubai and, over much wine, we debated the ethics of eating meat, agreeing to always disagree when I said that I had no moral issue with eating animals. 

Then I remembered when I last saw Dave in person - we met at a pub in London a few years back and I turned up with my dress tucked into my tights - a faux pas I only realised when I took my coat off before going to the bar - and walked across the pub with my bum on display. I can still hear him roaring with laughter. I chose the restaurant for dinner poorly - Maggie Jones is one of my favourite places in all of London but it slipped my mind that it is a terrible restaurant for anyone who doesn't eat meat. He pulled a face similar to the one in the photo with Paris Hilton as he perused the menu for a dish that would not offend his sensibilities, finally ordering the standard option offered by a chef who can't be arsed with vegetarians, a beetroot and goat's cheese tart. I, meanwhile, had the venison and he rolled his eyes and laughed loudly again. It is a restaurant where they charge for fine French wine by the inch from jeroboams - this amused him and all was well with the world again.

And since then, we communicated via Facebook. Quite a few of us became increasingly worried about him as he was slowly swallowed whole by boxes that needed to be unpacked, and by a collection of vintage horror books and magazines that he wanted to catalogue for sale to shore up his retirement fund. Tough love Facebook interventions were held, urging him to make a start, little by little, on the boxes, to accept the local offers of help, sharing links to vintage book dealers in the county who might be able to value his collection and maybe take the tomes off his hands. Dave became a frustrating, frustrated version of himself as he was increasingly overwhelmed by the house, his health issues and his disappointment about not being able to easily retire to his beloved France.

He last posted on Facebook on November 23 and it was a microcosm of his life towards the end - it appears that he had started cooking the formerly derided ready-meals instead of making dishes from scratch and sharing his tips on his page, but he was still dripping with his trademark sardonic tone: "Tesco is really losing the plot. A search for Thai ready-meals throws up ''Tesco Mushroom Stroganoff With Wild Rice' as its top suggestion. Such a well-known Thai dish..."

His birthday was on February 7. We all posted the obligatory Facebook birthday greetings, inquired about his wellbeing and wondered why he had been so uncharacteristically quiet. But it was a birthday he never quite got around to, all of us blissfully unaware that he had not been with us for a while. The sense that you are not alone with Facebook is merely illusory. A friend and I had talked about driving a van down to Chagford, turning up on his doorstep and blitzing the boxes. Maybe we should have set aside a weekend to do just that. Maybe we all could have done more. We will never quite know. 

The loose ends death almost always leave behind remain unbearably frayed, a ragged edge with which we must make peace.

What we do know is that a funny, smart, sometimes infuriating presence has gone from our lives. But he leaves behind a great legacy as a journalist and editor, as a mentor to many a young hack, as a staunch defender of print journalism. He would send me copies of the last magazine he edited before he retired, asking for my opinion on the contents and covers - for all his eagerness to be the first to share his views on everything from Bram Stoker to Brexit, Dave still sought out the honest opinions of people he respected. It was a privilege to be respected by Dave.

Despite living the latter years of his life largely online, Dave was always an entertaining presence in the real world. We should remember him with joy, with wine, and with opinionated but friendly debates, ideally over the dinner table with fine cheese to finish.

Vegetables and the age of entitlement

Spanish spinach. Spanish peppers. Dutch tomatoes. Dutch onions. Irish mushrooms. These vegetables all found their way into the pasta sauce I made for dinner last night. They were all readily available for a reasonable price at the supermarket yesterday afternoon. This is despite the signs on empty or near-empty racks apologising for a shortage of other items of fresh produce because of climate conditions in southern Europe.

In unsurprisingly idiotic news, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express lost their collective shit over this, whining about vegetable price increases. Yesterday's Mail splashed with pictures of well-stocked supermarkets in continental Europe while we suffered here in Blighty with sad emptiness in our fresh produce sections.

Sheeple of Britain! Be woke! Those terrible Europeans are denying us our God-given right to eat cheap iceberg lettuce, courgettes, broccoli and aubergines at all times of year!

But surely the Mail and the Express, two of the emptiest vessels making the most noise on behalf of the Brexit campaign, should be welcoming these scenes of vegetable rationing in our supermarkets. Why aren't they delighted that Britain is having to import vegetables from California and Arizona to fill our supermarkets and our bellies? Why aren't they thrilled that Spain is keeping more fresh produce for itself rather than sending it all our way?

After all, this is what they convinced people to sign up for when they voted to leave the EU.

Without free trade with Europe - and this will happen with a hard Brexit - European countries will charge us more for the myriad fruit and vegetables that we currently enjoy even when they are out of season.

We will have to rely on markets further afield, such as the warmer states of the US, to make up for any shortages, and there will be increased costs and an increased carbon footprint. Even if Theresa May can get Britain a good free trade agreement with the US (excuse me while I laugh so hard my bladder explodes...), the cost of transporting fruit and vegetables from the US to here means it won't necessarily be any cheaper - and those costs will be passed onto consumers. Fruit and veg growers are businesses, not charities.

As well as the rank hypocrisy of pro-leave newspapers whining like fussy-eater toddlers about direct consequences of leaving the EU, the vegetable furore shines a light on our collective sense of entitlement. The howls of protest in supermarkets across the nation when suddenly people couldn't access whatever vegetable they wanted are pretty pathetic when considered in a global and historic context.

There was a time in Britain when lettuce was generally only available from mid-May until the end of October. This weekend, we have people panic-buying lettuce.

We are now accustomed to simply popping down to the supermarket and expecting all the produce to be there all the time. Sure, some of us prefer to buy from the independent greengrocers, the farmers' markets or grow our own, but overall, we expect to see everything from asparagus to zucchini every time we pop into the shops, whether we want to buy it or not. We are ridiculously privileged.

The age of entitlement is right there for all to see in Sainsbury's, Tesco, Morrisons and Asda stores up and down Britain, and in supermarkets of developed countries around the world.

Indeed, in my native Australia, I grew up with the rise of all-year-round fruit and veg in supermarkets. Supply grew along with the Australian palate growing up. I remember, with retching horror, the khaki-coloured, flaccid tinned asparagus of the 1980s. But I rediscovered asparagus as an adult in its fresh, green glory, pan-fried in butter, wrapped in proscuitto, maybe sprinkled with a little grated fresh parmesan, available at Sydney supermarkets whenever I wanted...

It wasn't until I moved to Dubai in 2006 and was working on an entertainment and lifestyle magazine that it really occurred to me that asparagus season was a thing. I started getting press releases in May from five-star hotels with asparagus promotions at their restaurants. I had to ask my British colleagues why I was suddenly overrun with asparagus press releases and I discovered that asparagus season runs from St George's Day - April 23 - until the June 21 summer solstice.

Asparagus season seemed so quaint to me at the time, but we now expect to have all the fruit and vegetables at all times. The very notion of produce being in and out of season, and hard to come by when it's not in season, seems pretty damn retro too. Just as well the bad weather on the continent only represents a blip to our entitlement to the vegetables of Europe. Oh, wait...




Photography by whologwhy/Flickr

Liquid food dripping down the slippery slope

Anyone who has ever seen my Facebook page will be nonplussed to know I was in one of those I-must-keep-going-because-someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet arguments the other day. It was over, of all things, liquid food. In particular, it was about a New York Times article a friend posted about Soylent, the ironically named liquid food substitute that is apparently taking Silicone Valley by storm.

Soylent is made up of all the nutrients the FDA recommends one should eat in a day. As if everyone needs exactly the same quantity of nutrients regardless of multiple biological variables. But it's so easy! You simply add water to the powder and drink the resulting bland, porridge-coloured sludge in lieu of actual food.

Rob Rhinehart, the software engineer who came up with this idea goes to great pains to tell us it's not a weight loss product and that it is not meant to replace all meals. But, naturally, because human beings love quick fixes when it comes to weight loss, this is inevitably what it will be used for, especially when journalists have tried it out and reported weight loss.

And the New York Times report features people in Silicone Valley who are indeed living on nothing but Soylent. They are just too damn busy to be arsed with proper meals. And this is where the whole thing becomes inherently depressing. People living on Soylent have become the inevitable result of the cult of busy. It is partly down to pressure in workplaces to work longer rather than smarter, for costs being cut through understaffing, for people to define themselves entirely by their work.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with working hard to make something of yourself. But the cult of busy has generated an inflated sense of self-importance among many of us. The notion that something really bad will happen if you leave work on time, as if the sky will fall if you leave it until tomorrow to finish a task after you've had a good night's sleep, that you exist solely for work at the expense of human relationships or any real joy.

We are now in an era where too many of us answer the question: "How are you?" with a sigh, an eyeroll and a diatribe about how damn busy we are. I've done this. Most of us have. It's as if we're now ashamed to answer "How are you?" with a "I'm great, thanks. I get out of work at 5pm most days and I am sleeping really well and spending loads of time with friends and family."

In the Facebook argument, I made these points along with a lament for another nail in the coffin of real food, another way to take people further away from the joy of eating and preparing meals.

I am quite sure the people who begged to differ, who said they'd be interested in trying out Soylent because cooking doesn't interest them are perfectly nice people. Hell, if they want to spend their money on something that hospitals buy for a fraction of the price to force-feed anorexics they can knock themselves out. It's the money and their gastrointestinal tracts.

But the argument did shine a light on the glorification of not being able to cook. For fuck's sake, people. Even if you don't cook a cordon bleu meal every night, cooking is a life skill every adult should have. There is nothing big or clever about not being able to cook at least a few basic dishes. In the argument, I was accused of harking back to a pre-technology era - but, ironically, the conveniences of a modern kitchen make it easier than ever to cook and preserve food.

Of course, this is easy for me, or anyone who lives in a developed country, to say. What about the poor people of developing countries? Those without access to refrigeration or an efficient stove? Well, just as well then that Rob Rhinehart has the answers!

Except he doesn't really. In fact, he is a bit of a douche when it comes to his big idea for solving poverty. He proposes giving people in developing countries a Soylent-producing algae so they can keep making Soylent indefinitely. He says this would eliminate the need for factories and farms. Yes, because who needs factories? They only create jobs to help people out of poverty. And, frankly, how dare he deny the cultural importance of agriculture to millions of people across the world. How dare he slag off all agriculture instead of recognising its importance and recognising that it needs to evolve in an efficient and ethical way.

But it's OK because they can make all this Soylent! Yeah. Those poverty-stricken ingrates should be glad of any food, even if it is tasteless sludge. Why would they ever aspire to choice? Why would they ever want access to energy so they can cook their favourite foods safely and efficiently?

Rhinehart flippantly added that "all we'd have to do is fix the world's housing problem and people could be free". Yes, it's as simple as that in his privileged, arrogant, ignorant world. Sustainable development clearly isn't a concept he has spent much time with. How the hell does he think houses happen? Houses require building skills, which can be taught so people have a way of earning a living. Ideally, houses should be designed so they are appropriate for the needs of the people who live in them and make sense in their environment. Houses need access to energy to be effective places to live, work, study and, yes, cook actual meals in 2015.

Energy poverty needs to be addressed to make any of this possible. On top of that, access to education is the best way to help people out of poverty, to ensure they have a better life than their parents did. Access to healthcare is also important. Rhinehart's simplistic soundbite-friendly non-solutions patronise the world's poor.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest Rhinehart hasn't really thought this through. For now, he is just trying to meet demand for orders in the US, an effort which required him to raise $20 million in venture capital. If his main goal is to make pots of money, fair play to him. He is a businessman in a free market economy and, as far as I can tell, he hasn't broken any laws. The ingredients of Soylent are not a secret. Consumers can make an informed choice.

And if they choose to forego the joy of food because they are too damn busy and important to pause for a proper meal, so be it. If they see fit to behave like overgrown adult babies who don't want to learn to cook, whatever. If they want to help Rhinehart get rich, that is also up to them. But don't sugar-coat your choice with the naive belief that Soylent is going to be a major force in changing the world for the better.

Women, chocolate and stupid (but probably effective) marketing

Special K! Now with chocolate! For the ladies! Because ladies love chocolate! But ladies still want to be slim! And Special K will help you stay slim while still indulging your love of chocolate!

Yes, that would be Special K, the breakfast cereal that has been marketed in a patronising manner for as long as I can remember as the breakfast cereal of choice for those who want to be slim and fabulous. That would be the same Special K that has more sugar than a slice of McVities chocolate cake - and that is before Kellogg's adds the chocolate.

Ugh. It's all part of a whole load of idiocy when it comes to marketing food to women and in creating myths that people end up believing. Special K is one of many foods marketed as a ticket to slenderness, even when it is not particularly healthy.

But this isn't about health, is it? It is about looking fabulous. And while there is nothing wrong with looking fabulous, Special K, now with chocolate, is a stupid way to try and attain the weight loss that is associated with all this fabulousness.

If you are an adult and you want to eat Special K with chocolate for breakfast, that's fine. That's your choice. But if you are deluding yourself that it's a healthy breakfast, it's not an informed choice. If you know it's not healthy but you eat it anyway, again, that's your choice but at least you have some awareness about it.

Sadly, when it comes to food, smart women make dumb decisions with alarming frequency. Cue the rise of diets that cut out entire food groups (usually carbohydrates, despite not all carbs being created equal), for example. Or any sort of quick-fix weight loss solution that does not involve exercise or permanent lifestyle change, for that matter. Lifestyle change is boring but it's not as marketable as sexy simple solutions. Or Special K with chocolate.

The marketing of Special K with chocolate as some sort of indulgence (while still keeping you all slim...) is just part of a mass unhealthy relationship with food that is all too common. This is the attitude that labels chocolate or cheese or a dessert as "naughty" - rather than it being something to enjoy as part of a normal diet.

It is rare for a man to say he is being naughty as he tucks into a sticky date pudding. The culture of naughtiness surrounding certain foods infantilises women, creates guilt where none needs to exist, and results in obsession. But companies like Special K need this mentality to continue if they are to sell food under the false guise that it is both healthy and an indulgence. Then again, when it comes to Special K, we shouldn't expect too much from the cereal that was sold with this lame advert: Australian Special K advert from 1991
   

You guessed it! It's another world of stupid!

Here we go again with further idiocy that cannot go unnoticed. Last week, we saw idiocy involving kids in politics, horse meat, Megan Fox, horrific events at a US campus, a Maria Sharapova-sugar brouhaha, a Jimmy Savile puppet and a cycling goon.

1. OK, so President Obama has signed a load of executive orders in favour of gun control and he did so surrounded by children. The US right, unsurprisingly, has called him out on this. It is gimmicky because good policy should stand up without using kids as props. Regardless of the issue, using kids for political gain has always been a tad unseemly, whether it's kissing babies, posing with photogenic offspring to appeal show off one's family values or whatever. Ugh. But then the NRA also called out Obama for having armed guards protect his own children. Yes. That is because as the children of the most powerful man in the world, Sasha and Malia are obvious targets. For people who may be getting their hands on guns a little too easily.

2. The great British horse meat debacle has resulted in a festival of equestrian puns - and a festival of absurd hysteria. There was a nationwide gross-out when it was revealed that Tesco's pre-made beef burgers contained horse meat. People who are perfectly happy to eat cows, sheep, pigs and chickens panicked and declared it was disgusting. Never mind that the addition of some nice, lean horse meat might actually improve a burger, and cheval is a damn sight better than the crap in the average hot dog - these people were not going to eat Seabiscuit! Then there were the sanctimonious vegetarians who used this as another excuse to be sanctimonious vegetarians.

The horsey beef burgers brouhaha wasn't a failure of food hygiene. It was merely a failure of food labelling. If the label tells the consumer there is horse in their burger, they can make the choice as to whether they find that appalling or if they simply decide that a horse is like a delicious, long-necked, more agile cow.

3. Stephen Marche has written a profile piece on Megan Fox for the US edition of Esquire magazine that is so embarrassingly awful, the only viable excuse for it is that he lost a bet. Marche's words were beyond parody. There was a long riff about ancient Aztec sacrifice, he slags off the physical attributes of Lena Dunham, Adele and Amy Adams in his defence of Fox, he writes without any apparent irony that her skin is "the colour the moon possesses in the thin air of northern winters."

Fox joins the irony vacuum by saying how she doesn't want to be famous anymore while posing for a magazine in her underwear.

But my favourite bit is Marche's description of Fox's lips: "The lip on the left curves exactly the same way as the lip on the right." Either Marche is confused by facial anatomy or he isn't describing the lips on her face...

4. Manti Te'o, a US college football star who plays for Notre Dame (which seems be inexplicably pronounced in the US as "Noter Dame" - I'd love an explanation of this), fabricated a story about a dead girlfriend. For months, the US sports media believed that Te'o's beloved, one Lennay Kekua, was in a serious car crash and was then diagnosed with leukaemia. The story became even more tragic when Te'o revealed that Kekua passed away on September 11, aged 22, within hours of his real-life grandmother dying. Except Kekua never existed and Deadspin.com was able to reveal that Kekua never existedand Te'o's story contained enough holes to make a tonne of Swiss cheese.

A Notre Dame spokesperson said Te'o was fooled by an elaborate online and phone hoax. Er, right.

But here is a story from Notre Dame that is far more important and deserves far more airplay than the moronic Te'o.

5. Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova garnered 40,000 Twitter followers after her first tweet: "Your ultimate sugarmama has arrived. #myfirsttweet." I'm not sure what is more idiotic - the fact that such a banal tweet would be so popular or the fact that the tweet is promoting her new candy company, the awkwardly named Sugarpova. Actually, the biggest idiots are possibly the people who are now angry with her for starting a candy company when she is allegedly meant to be a role model promoting a healthy lifestyle. Or perhaps people could start taking responsibility for what they put in their mouths rather than looking to a shrieking tennis player for guidance.

6. The BBC accidentally repeated a Tweenies episode from 2001 featuring a spoof of Jimmy Savile as a puppet presenting Top of the Pops. It was a stupid blunder, someone should have checked et cetera, et cetera. But the outcry is simply today's excuse for the pearl-clutchers to get their knickers in a twist and slag off the BBC. Any kids who happened to catch the episode on Cbeebies yesterday morning wouldn't have a clue who he was and are blissfully unaware of the horrible news stories that keep erupting. Any offended parents who spotted it could simply turn the TV off and get on with their lives. Anyone whose kids were actually harmed by the puppet yesterday should call the police to have it arrested.

7. Lance Armstrong. That is all.


Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com

Airline food: it sucks but it's not oppressive

A hysterical press release has just landed in my inbox. The less-than-snappy headline is: AIRLINES TAKE NOTE! YOUR FULLY LOADED CARBOHYDRATE MEALS ARE NOT SUITABLE TO THE EVER INCREASING NUMBER OF WOMEN TRAVELLING IN YOUR PASSENGER CABINS!

Like most stupid press releases, this one is the result of a survey. According to maiden-voyage.com, "the business travel network for professional women" (who clearly don't care about the virginal undertones of the website's name) and inflightfeed.com "dedicated to highlighting pre order and buy on board airline meals" (whoever wrote this press release only has a passing relationship with punctuation), "76% of women surveyed feel that airlines are not doing enough to cater to their needs."

The survey of "professional women around the world" aimed to find out what women really want from airline meals. Personally, I'll take "edible and with free wine" but clearly I am a carb-guzzling, alcoholic failed female. The 76% of furious women surveyed felt that airline food is too carbohydrate-heavy and "suited more to male consumers". I travel a lot and I can honestly say I've never felt gender-oppressed by airline food. I have endured airline food that is tasteless, bland or boring, but I haven't sat there fuming about gender discrimination because the food sucks.

This whiny 76% (and I'll make an exception for anyone with special dietary needs because I'm not a complete bitch) win today's prize for Ultimate First World Pains Complaint. Crap airline food isn't a gender issue. Airline food pisses off people equally, regardless of gender. It's not just women freaking out at carbs, it's diabetics, coeliacs, vegans, Muslims who want halal meals, Jews who want kosher meals, people with allergies, parents of fussy eaters, grown-up fussy eaters, people with tastebuds...

Sure, there may be room for improvement with the food on many airlines, but some perspective is required. If you are travelling by air for business, you are probably well-paid, have a rewarding career and your standard of living is probably pretty good. You are probably aware that plenty of airlines allow you to pre-order meals and you surely must know that even if you don't have special dietary needs, you are perfectly entitled to ask for a special meal, such as a diabetic meal, if you think it might be healthier. Hell, I'm a committed carnivore but if my bowels are quaking at the prospect of an airline chicken salmonella festival, I just ask for the vegetarian option. I assume that if you are a professional woman who travels regularly for work, then you are not a complete idiot.

The airline food experience is usually no more than three meals, depending on how long the flight is. Indeed, in this inane press release, one Nikos Loukas from inflightfeed.com explains why airline food is not Michelin star cuisine: "Airlines tend to look at passenger demographics on each route to work out what will be offered on their buy on board menus."

Exactly, Nikos. And this demographic analysis would equally apply to food served by airlines as part of the cost of the ticket too. Airlines have to feed a large number of people, they want to do it in a cost-effective manner, they need to serve food that tries to appeal to a broad range of people. Airlines are not charities, they are not airborne detox retreats, they are not able to easily offer every single passenger exactly what they want to eat.
 
Worldwatch Institute estimates that only 5% of the world's population has travelled on an aircraft. So if you are part of the fortunate 5%, you might want to check your privilege next time you start feeling oppressed because the airline is serving too many bread rolls.

Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com