Keep food on the table

Sailing forth. After a fiercely social festive season – during which, over twelve consecutive nights, I had people staying at my place or was away at someone else’s – I’ve had a period of withdrawal. Not planned – it just came naturally. One of the foci of my attention has been my larder. I’m asking myself if I was a squirrel in a previous incarnation, for I when I dig into my cupboards I find jars and jars of grains, lentils, beans, nuts and dried fruit, some of which I realise I transported from Wageningen to Brussels (despite making a determined effort to ‘eat it out’). So this month, and possibly next, my efforts are focused on eating my way through this store cupboard. It’s a good strategy for this time of year. They are mostly hearty warming foods, which can be made into a satisfying meal with minimal purchases to ‘beef them out’. One experiment a ‘soup’ with wheat grains, dried seaweed and a pack of dried mixed veg. from the deep freeze went horribly wrong – and I was reduced to opening a can of cassoulet that was lingering in the tins cupboard, but - hey - that needs eating out too! But others have been successful. I’m learning to make dumplings (two lingering bags of flour of unknown purchase date) to go in stews and soups. I have made a rice dish laced with almonds and raisins, a useful base for any meal, braised a small (<1 Euro) portion of liver with onions and mushrooms and served it on top of polenta, made a kilo of so of coleslaw for a few cents. In short I want to eat out my cupboard and there’s plenty of ways to do that – ways that teach me something about food and my relationship with it. A few years ago I was at a lecture in Wageningen given by a visiting South African Professor. He was talking about a survey he had been involved in to establish levels of food security in a township (I forget where). On average the respondents had an average of 6-7 items in their cupboards: this included sugar, salt, and tea. ****! I have more than six or seven varieties of tea (and probably fifty herbs and spices) in mine. I don’t think any academic ‘fact’ has ever left such an impression on me: more than any stats about the number of hungry people/children in the world. That stat was something I could relate to – as part of my daily life. But I am still unsure how any behaviour change on my part can contribute to lessening the physical distress that something like one-sixth of the world’s population experiences by not having access to sufficient food.