STRANGE how those TV chefs' programmes and columns lovingly describing recipes and restaurants do not provoke the obvious effect, tastebuds remain untingled, not a drop of salivation, no dash to see what gourmet delicacies lurk in the fridge. Yet one report had me positively drooling – Rod Stewart's song of praise to stovies at Dundee United.
Ah! The sheer scrumptiousness of a piled-up plate of stoved tatties, preferably of the corned beef kind, with a plump, glistening sausage sticking from the top and a dribble of pan-grease creating a combination of culinary Heaven and Hell. Stovies ar
e one of the great leftover dishes of the Scottish working class. As my Grandad used to say: "Ah like mince fur there's nae waste", for today's mince'n'ingins are tomorrow's stovies.
Perhaps Gordon Brown had his homeland dish of stovies in mind when he admonished us to waste not, want not and stop throwing away groceries worth more than £1bn a year. "Unnecessary" purchases add £420 a year to the average family's shopping bills at a time when rising prices cause us all to wince at the supermarket till.
The PM's strictures are a reminder that our attitude to food is bonkers. The big weekly-monthly buy piling up food to fill the freezer, convenience packs that remain unopened by their sell-by dates and are binned, supermarkets that over-order and have to slash prices or send perfectly edible food to the landfill, the amounts dumped by restaurants or even leavings from outsize helpings are all symptomatic of a society that finds waste acceptable.
Low-income families struggle to buy basic foodstuffs, which have seen the biggest price increases. Meanwhile, we have become a nation of fancy-food worshippers and TV cooks are the high priests and priestesses.
Check out last week's menu on the BBC Food website – seared tuna with avocado puree and radish and apple salad; shiso and daikon cress, whatever they are; spatchcocked poussin with chilli jam; and strawberry mille-feuille. Are they kidding? I like my scran as much as the next man, and have the figure to prove it, but Superwoman Shirley Conran was right when she said life is too short too stuff a mushroom.
Food addicts (because that is what they are) will turn up their noses at lower-class fodder made from scrag ends. Jamie, Delia, Nigel, Nick, Anthony and the foul-mouthed Ramsay could perform a national service by making programmes about how to turn scraps and slops into haute cuisine.
I don't need these gastronomic posers because I have the WI cookbook and Exciting Cooking published 50 years ago, with a special section on cooking with leftovers.
Anyone brought up in those times of austerity knows you will not get tastier, more filling dishes than those rustled up from humble fare – meat roll, rissoles, bubble and squeak, soups, curry, even faggots before the term acquired a more modern meaning. Ditto pork belly, potted heid, tongue and tripe (not the greyish, gluey mess the English serve up, but decent Scottish tripe in a milky gravy with a white pudding, or better still the French and Italian style with tomatoes and garlic).
Of course, it was deeply hypocritical that at Hokkaido Gordon Brown and the other leaders of the eight richest nations discussed food shortages and their effect on the world's poor then sat down to a series of belly-bloating banquets, from asparagus and truffle soup at lunch to "winter lily bulb and summer savoury", kelp-flavoured beef and asparagus grilled eel and burdock, hairy crab bisque and milk-fed lamb in an 18-course dinner washed down with eight wines.
They are welcome to that lot, except for the wines, because I have found Japanese grub to be cold, insipid and far from filling, in fact what I imagine cat food to be like. And you know what you can do with your tofu steak.
We should not have been surprised at the G8 lavishness because at Gleneagles in 2005 they polished off smoked salmon, langoustines, local Glenearn lamb and £700-a-bottle Krug champagne, but failed to Make Poverty History. Brown and the others could not offend their hosts but in future they could make a collective decision in advance to make do with beer and sandwiches and donate the money from that one meal to feeding several hundred poor families. They might enjoy eating their own words.
And not only world leaders; politicians of all ranks from Cabinet down to councillors do not seem able to function without swanky dinners, lavish lunches and snacks paid for by us. One civil servant friend tells me the best chocolate biscuits he has ever had in his life are served in St Andrew's House and the best, most heavily subsidised and exclusive canteen in Scotland is the private dining room for MSPs at Holyrood. Political noses at all levels always seem to end up in the trough and not for nothing did Dickens describe in Pickwick Papers a by-election for the constituency of Eatanswill.
I used to think feed-the-world fast days and do-without-lunch-one-day-a-week campaigns were meaningless gestures, but a little self-denial and sensible use of what's left in our larders makes sense in a time of global crisis. Remember the old Scottish saying: "Serve sma', serve a'."
Maybe, every now and then, I will settle for a bowl of workhouse gruel and unlike Oliver Twist I will not say: "Please, sir, I want some more". Now then, which wine should I have with that?
The full article contains 945 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
