The taste of Food

I do like my food. Not quantity, but quality. I define quality as taste; which means that, if it tastes good – I like it. I over eat on food I like. So, at over 60, I’m short and stout like Pooh Bear. A suitable epitaph would be: “He liked his food”.

Take salmon. There is a lot of salmon about for you to buy. There’s bright pink soft fleshy fish in the supermarket now which is OK. It’s fish, it’s high in omega whatists isn’t it? It doesn’t taste a lot, but you console yourself with the thought that it seems pretty good value, and is supposed to be good for you because it’s high in fishy oils. 

Then there is the organic salmon lying next to the bright pink salmon. The organic salmon is delicately coloured, a subdued flesh, less Technicolor, more like ‘English Rose’ than ‘Mediterranean Beauty’. When you cook it, the flesh is very delicate, the taste is very subtle, you get a glow from knowing it is organic, but it doesn't actually taste particularly different from its bright pink neighbour on the slab.

Then there is wild salmon. Dense dark rich coloured, exotic and heady, the taste is robust and of the wild sea and tumbling rivers. The taste, like the appearance of the meat is defined, not flaccid. This fish has had to work for its food, it has grown naturally, working for a living, not sculling around in some cage in a Scottish loch, and I can both see and taste the difference.

So what is it about ‘organic’ meat? If we chose our meat solely according to what it is fed on, then maybe we are missing a vital factor. For like me; if the food is too easily come by, and in too great a quantity, then the animal is over fed. It will be fat, flaccid, lacking in texture and taste. (Believe me, I do not taste good).  

However, if the fish, chicken, lamb, or whatever, has to work for its food, gets plenty of exercise, grows at a natural rate, then it will taste better. Maybe natural growth it is just as important for the development of food as the ‘organic’ label.

The sound of protest

It is 5 to 7 and we make a Skype call to our son Miles Drawmer, who lives in Kadikoy a suburb on the Asian side of Istanbul.
“Oh good.” He says, “You have called at a special time.”
It was just before 9pm local time, and Miles took us to the open window. The computer camera accentuates the evening light and we can see down into the street.
At 9 o’clock the sounds started. Hundreds of residents of one of the world’s mega cities, leaning out of their windows at the same time every night and registering their protest by banging pots and pans.

Miles tells us that it has been going on for two weeks now. Every night at the same time, this noisy citizens’ protest against their government.
This isn’t a bunch of hooligans and foreigners; this is the people of the city raising a clamour for change.
The noise is both jarring and moving as one realises the number of people involved, and that there’s probably very little the police can do about this with their water cannons and tear gas.

“I’ll call you back.” He says.
Good job too, it was far too noisy to make conversation with. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told hundreds of thousands of supporters at a rally in Istanbul on Sunday that the protesters were manipulated by "terrorists". These citizens aren’t terrorists, and they’re not listening to him.