The Tesco Christmas delivery slots are filling up fast, our sausagey fingers grabbing at space, dragging potatoes into our baskets, and biscuits, and various selections of butter. Our relationship with food alters slightly at this time of year, doesn’t it? It sways and fattens.
Christmas ads show families literally applauding as a glittering feast appears on their table – this is food as performance, food as trophy, food as glue. A synthetic memory, nostalgia for turkeys past, for dinners when everyone laughed and drank and nobody mentioned the bad thing. Shop-bought sandwiches this month come heavy with mayonnaise and meat, and sprinkled with crispy onions – the idea is that, like Willy Wonka’s Three Course Dinner chewing gum, which gave the illusion you were eating tomato soup, roast beef and blueberry pie, one bite of a Pret Christmas sandwich should not just offer a whole meal, but also transport you far far from the staff room of the shoe shop or sticky office desk to that hallowed cosy kitchen surrounded by people who love you. Each bite is its own little dinner – the first pulls out a chair, the second asks how your day was, the third rubs your shoulders, the fourth (you pick some matter perhaps now from between your teeth and take a swig of cooling tea) has remembered the book you mentioned earlier in the year and shyly bought it for you, signed.
Christmas work lunches offer a similarly hallucinatory promise. Instead of sitting in silence on your phones beside colleagues to eat, as is custom – people who you adore, depend on, pity and detest depending on such variables as the temperature of the air conditioning and whether they cycled in today – the substitution of tuna sandwich for roast meats, and the offer of a glass of wine performs a kind of spell. We are not simply workers, grinding daily beside each other in a performance of productivity, we are comrades, we are humans, we are people who offer each other the salt, and memories, and compliments, and we lean in over the gravy, sometimes staining our sleeves, and sometimes laughing about it.
Food is not just food at this time of year, it is the lubricant for celebration and even if these festive meals can be predictable and suspect in their magic, their simplicity comes now as something of a relief. Because this has been a decade of food confusion. In among the “diversity bowls” (these are bowls of food, ironically, where each item is segregated from the next) and milkshakes loaded with toppings like bacon, social media food trends have told an unhappy story of a people in decline. Meals are prepared quickly for a camera, with unbodied gloved hands and sharp knives to a soundtrack of French Café Accordion Waltz 2.
While last year saw a move towards the decadent – this was a time of “butter boards” and caviar on Doritos and food made gold – this year’s food trends have been characterised by such things as “tinned fish” and instant ramen. Cash is running out. We are making do with what’s in the cupboard. Except, what’s in the cupboard, we’re learning, is killing us. Not only are we supposed to be eating “30 plants a week” (points if you can name 30 plants), but every second food is “ultra-processed”. These are the foods that are both addictive and bad for us, the very worst possible combination for a lunch and the latest piece of our food education that helps make the question of how to eat ever more baffling.
Outside the house it is no less mad. Menus somehow remain a place of eroticism and great violence. I dare you to find one avocado, potato or chickpea in a UK city that remains unsmashed. I regularly pass a café on my way through town which is called Eggslut (my friend Joe, incidentally, says this is his special word for “woman”). Here is a theme that recurs throughout the fast food cinematic universe, this evolution from the original “dirty” burger, this sense that our sandwiches might one day shag our sister. As a man called Ross Sayers said on X (formerly Twitter): “Burgers used to be called ‘plain’ and ‘cheese’. Now they’re called ‘dirty mother clucker finger blaster’ and ‘The Whore’.”
Food is unique, here, in that we don’t use sexual language like this for anything else we buy or consume, do we? Moisturisers are rarely horny. Recycling bins do not boast of their thickness. Books are not “bad boys”. Fungal creams do not claim to be wet for us. Verruca socks are yet to be rebranded as sheaths for hot hard veiny feet. Food, however, is insane. It encourages us to veer wildly between feeling smug about eating healthily and savage about being wicked. We lie spent, covered in ketchup, writhing in our moral failings, after sweating through so much consecrated couscous. There is no in between.
Which is why I welcome the uncomplicated story this season’s food tells, why my basket fills with sprouts and frozen canapés, and why I enter the long cold winter of white meat, smiling.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
