FRICTION AND THE FEEDING PUBLIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 287, 22 December 1944, Page 12

FRICTION AND THE FEEDING PUBLIC

The Worries and Joys of A Peripatetic Gastronome

(Written for "The Listener" b}

CALORY

isn’t what it used to be. I do not refer merely to the fact that you can’t order a tenderboy steak as a normal part of a three-course meal, or to the fact that rationing and staff difficulties have caused your favourite restaurant to withdraw their entire range of hot dishes and limit the menu to saldds and an occasional "special." I refer to things more abstract, things that are altering our lives in subtle ways. in public these days Take the man whose home is four sections from town, who accustomed himself to adjourn each day to the same table with the same small circle of good friends who shared his feeling that the food and the cleanliness are important but that one’s privacy, one’s sense of security, and one’s sense of ownership are equally so, That man may if he chooses hold his place tenaciously, continue to know roughly what sort of conversation will accompany,his eating and continue to derive satisfaction from the

feeling that this is Ais table, Ais chair.

But he will pay a price for it. Week after week he will be confronted by his salads, saveloys, sausages, and "salmon’--or "N.Z, fish’ as I have also seen it called-and every day he will have to go through a little private ritual of refusing to admit the monotony of it. Every week he will stubbornly refuse the tempting offers of his acquaintances to lead him away to the flesh-pots, because in secret he has sneaked into these places by night and found no repose for his soul in their alien environment. That man makes his stomach and not hjs soul pay the price, and by some great effort of mind over matter he manages to keep the price down. But what about the other member of that party, who also liked the privacy, the predictability of the conversation, and the seat impressed with his own personal curvature, but whose mouth watered at the tales of the flesh-pots? He listened credulously to the description of a little place, a little dark and poky perhaps, where they have a hot dish every day; "No, perhaps the tea is not quite freshly made, but there is always plenty of butter..." And he was tempted away. thee Eheu! This unlucky man became a victim of the situation I have been studying, and he soon found his soul chafed by that friction which I have made my theme. Wherever his stomach led him to wander -for no loyal crew bound this Ulysses to the mast when the Sirens called to him at noon — he searched in vain for

the repose he once enjoyed. His tongue, his tooth, his palate, and his stomach in turn found their satisfaction. At one time it might be an ascetic satisfaction found in devouring coarse brown bread; at another time it might be the sheer

voluptuousness of opening a carefullydone omelette, a specialty-of-the-house at one of those lonely spots to which he could never lure his friends. But whatever fleshly delights he discovered, he always was secretly aware (though you will never get him to admit it when he comes to sit at your table some day) that there was a constant spiritual irritation wearing away his Joy of Living. He became that latest unhappy creature of the age we live in, the Peripatetic Gastronome, sad-eyed, broken in spirit, wandering the noon-day streets in a vain search. He is always. trying to delude himself, like a child that has been forbidden to scratch its chicken-pox, always trying to pretend there is no irritation really,

But when I speak of irritation and friction and chafing I do not mean in matters merely material. I know that just after noon and just after one, our unhappy man may actually have to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi, to whom fish means just fish and eggs are eggs however they are done, but that’s not what I mean. Nor do I refer to the fact that he must permit and endure contacts with his person that would never be tolerated if the object of his search were anything less vital-for instance a new hat, or a tie. Imagine our friend, diffident by nature, exhibiting in a draper’s shop those brutish characteristics that have surreptitiously crept into his eatinghouse ways! Man Maketh Manners For instance his habit, when he finds himself at the back of a queue, of suddenly seeing a friend eating on the far side of the room, ostentatiously going over to speak to him, and then when a couple of seats fall vacant near by, beating the people in the front of the queue to them. Or the habit of reconnoitring discreetly until a table has been located where a mother and daughter are at the icecream stage and standing over them all very tactfully, not quite going so far as to eye them every 20 seconds, but nevertheless precipitating their departure. What did our good citizen know of these practices a year or two ago? What subtle poison has corrupted his heart to this extent, that to-day his powers of perception are so highly developed that he can pick out two pairs of women at the ice-cream stage and determine by an occult process which pair will smoke at leisure, and which two will reach for their handbags in a moment and depart? He wouldn’t have understood these things a few years ago because it wasn’t necessary to, The facts no doubt were there, but before he need have worked out such intricacies, the head waitress would have led him to a table. Croquettes de Lapin Even the most naive citizen has mastered the most complicated techniques by now. He has accomplished the swift deciphering (even under the eye of a waitress) of a menu written in dogFrench, so that now he can select a reasonably-priced meal from a menu that is designed to make him choose a very expensive one. He knows that by alternating between two rival establishments +he can create in each the impression that he is a "regular" ‘and will as a result be favoured with small perks, safe in the knowledge that his deception will never (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) be uncovered, for the personnel of these two competing houses seem to have been forbidden to recognise even the existence of the opposite faction-or was that not the reason for the look of horror on a waitress’s face when I mentioned La belle Cuisine in her hearing one day? He also knows that if a new eatinghouse should be set up, particularly if it is out to catch the trade of another, he may rely on being well fed for a matter of four or five weeks, large helpings being accompanied by the explanation "We always spoil our regulars." Probably he has also discovered, as a friend of mine reported from a Southern city, that an easy way to the heart of a lazy waitress is to sit. about a long time afterwards, thus relieving her of the need to re-lay the table too soon. Or perhaps he has acquired that dexterity in the handling of butter which I picked up during a period when good coffee lured me to a smallish establishment in a back street. I can dispose of one small dish of butter so swiftly that the proprietor sees nothing, and then accept a second from a friendly waitress as if it were my first, It is hard to imagine that our Peripatetic Gastronome has failed to perfect this useful trick. Halibutosis Another modern technique that has become essential since Canadian salmon disappeared is that of mesmerising the person opposite you when he studies the

menu, in the hope that he will not choose "N.Z, Fish Salad." For there is no doubt that the odour of this pungent delicacy mixes ungraciously with one’s own dessert or tea,

Still, however successful he is in] applying these techniques, our friend never fully succeeds in freeing himself of a sense of guilt. His shame will ever haunt him, and his only remedy is to keep his head, down, showing great interest in his food, and escaping the eyes of discerning women who know all the tricks far better than he does. Even so, he will be well aware of that conflict with his own race which daily reduces his actions to the crude standards that apply when a tin of mash is emptied in the fowl-run. He must realise in moments so secret as to be almost hidden from his own brain that his .behaviour in the queue, at the self-service counters and even at the table, could become habitual and disgraceful if present conditions were to last much longer. And he must daily find it necessary, somewhere between his lunch-hour and his five o’clock rush, to reconstitute himself by a conscious effort, into a human being fit to take his place at the head of a table with his own wife and children.

But obviously our friend cannot perform this feat every day without suffering strain, and therefore he must seek such compensations as his unnatural life can offer, I envy the happy man whose good fortune it was to overhear the incident which I am now about to recount as it was recounted to me. It befell, I understand, at an eating house at which one of the attractions is a fortnightly exhibition of works of art. Here you may eat your food in an atmosphere that affords intimate contact with the Higher Life. You may take your mind off the sordid realities of the fowlrun and the jungle waterhole by gazing at some of The Finer Things in Life. If fortune smiles, you may even have the artist himself pointed out to you by one who has met him. The tables at. this place are small enough and near enough together to make eavesdropping simple, indeed unayoidable, and my informant was near a table for four at which two seats were vacant. The other seats were occupied by a young woman whose dress denoted that she was in quest of the abovementioned Higher Life, and a young man who clung to the more solid bourgeois virtues. At the moment when my informant first overheard their conversation, the young man was being silent and unhelpful, and his admirer was being tense. She was trying to look into his eyes. She said "You do not lov me." He continued to roll a cigarette. Seeing two people considering the empty seats, she made one more attempt to rouse him before the last vestige of privacy should be taken from her. "You do not lov me." The strangers, a soldier and a girl who had obviously strayed in without knowing the character of the place, sat down within a few inches of the pair. The soldier soon sensed the tension, and began to fidget, He put his finger in his collar and pulled it round. Then he noticed the paintings on the walls and saw a means of escape from. the situation by opening a topic of conversation. After looking at them for a few moments he said to his girl: "These pictures are pretty bloody, aren’t they?" _ Opposite, our lady of the sandals and gold fingernails sighed deeply. "You do not lov me," she said, "and now zis man says my pictures are bloddy."