Hungry Planet

Before Noma stuck seaweed and ants on your plate, before Heston served up dirt with a difference and long before cakes looked less like food and more like reality there was food. Just food, real food. Food cooked with love by mothers for their families. Recipes handed down through generations and plates of food with no pretensions of being anything but what they are, a good hearty meal.

I am not turning my nose up at modern institutions producing ground breaking works of art with food I respect their work but if I want art I'll go to the Louvre and if wild roses with flatbread is what you need to serve up to be the number one restaurant in the world then so be it but I'll be sticking to honest to goodness food without the $300 price tag and side of moss.

I know this is completely ironic in the true sense of the word coming from someone who has made a living from producing high end cake art with a high end price tag but maybe I have exhausted all of my creative food talents and become bitter and jaded in the years I have spent satisfying the every whim of clients with wild ambitions on what will impress their 2 year old and their very selective 2 year olds friends. Aliens, superheros, merry go rounds, unicorns, life like trucks and cars, princesses, horses I have been asked for it all and I have have obliged, who I am to stand in the way of people who think they need to spend $500 on their kids birthday cakes, it is how I made my living. I enjoyed it, the creative outlet was fun, the money was better but somewhere along the way I lost track of the real point of it all, an expression of love and a gift in the form of food and shouldn't that come in a simpler form?

Whatever happened to mum's staying up through the night with their women's weekly cake books lovingly smearing buttercream on a sponge pig or train. That's how I grew up and I treasure the memories of picking out my cake from the book each year and knowing the efforts mum went to to create the cake for me to enjoy, you can't buy that.

At some point food needs to come back to it's roots. A plate of pasta served up on a hot summers day out in the garden with good friends. Hearty Indian Curries with hundreds of years of history that has combined to create that particular combination of spices. Afternoons spent around the family BBQ grilling up slabs of marinated lamb and evenings around the family dinner table with honest food made with love. It may not always be so pretty, it doesn't get plated with tweezers and garnished with edible flowers. It's just food and that's all I want.

Now that I have completely ragged out on myself and the entire high end food industry I feel a little guilty. Oh well it was just such an easy target...off I go to cook cheese on toast and wallow in my own cynicism.

Food served at Noma, Seriously you call that food, WTF is that? Image courtesy of Cyclonebill

Me and the Dalek Cake we created for my husbands birthday. 50 man hours and hundreds of dollars went into this cake, probably could have just cooked a carrot cake and been just as happy