I’ve been thinking about mustard recently. I mean, I’m always thinking about some kind of food. Between words today, I have been plotting my snack reward for going to the post office and thinking about dinner (it’s only 9am). I have studied the menu of a restaurant I have no plans to eat at and browsed Instagram shots of multiple bakeries, picking my top pastry at each. I assume everyone is like this, even though I’ve known it’s not true since I went to Bologna with a friend who, devastatingly, did not want to plot an hour-by-hour itinerary of the highest-rated gelato in the city.
But I’ve been thinking about food differently recently, about the fragility of it, and the many things that need to go just right for us to have a Twix, or a bag of salad, or a jar of mustard, or whatever else we reach for unthinkingly in the supermarket (yes, farmers have been telling us this for decades). Good luck reaching for dijon right now. There probably isn’t any and it won’t be back until November, on current predictions: last year’s Canadian heatwave halved the seed harvest. If you’re mildly put out, imagine how France – which consumes 1kg per person per year – is feeling. I have watched waves of Kübler-Ross mustard grief traverse the country: denial (how could we be dependent on foreign seed for a product so French?); anger (unsubstantiated allegations of supermarket stockpiling); bargaining (pots rumoured to be offered on eBay for vast sums); depression. Acceptance remains a way off. “‘Mustard makers have never seen the like of this,’ the grand master of the Dijon Mustard Fraternity choked out,” said one report, dramatically. I hope he wears yellow robes, maybe carries a giant mustard spoon like a bishop’s crozier.
Obviously, no one dies of condiment deprivation, so it’s an OK kind of shortage, softened by a raft of mustard TikToks of spoonfuls changing hands for €10 and moustachioed men losing their sang-froid. Apparently, sriracha is next (drought in Mexico), so stock up, sauce-heads.
This is where we are: those of us lucky enough to have lived so far without experiencing empty cupboards and bellies are experiencing a screeching U-turn out of complacency. The new scarcity mindset started to take shape following Dominic Raab’s ominous 2018 assurance that the sunlit uplands of post-Brexit Britain would have “adequate food” (when most of us had never imagined the converse might be possible). Covid brought the great pasta shelf-clearing (20 creative ways with lasagne sheets!) and the search for flour and yeast. This year we’ve had lettuce drought, sunflower-oil rationing, fruit and veg rotting, unpicked, again, and warnings of an imminent egg shortage.
The unthinking supermarket shelf reach is not quite a thing of the past, but we’ve seen how fragile the systems that allow it are, as just-in-time supply becomes far-too-late and war and pestilence, the perennial classics, are joined by the new-ish horseman of the apocalypse, climate collapse.
We also understand more about the other cost of food, beyond the spiralling ones on the shelf labels. I’ve written enough about sustainability that any walk around the supermarket is freighted: my thoughtless bad old days of supermarket king prawns, avocado with everything and sliced, plastic-packaged fruit seem outlandishly distant (I can’t look a prawn in its blank, black ball-bearing eyes any more). With years of damage to atone for, I scan the aisles, calculating the cost-benefit of plastic-wrapped cucumber and imported carrots like Terminator with climate anxiety.
We can’t always eat what we want and I don’t think that’s exclusively a bad thing. Our relationship with food has been dysfunctional for decades: “clean” eating, freakshakes, arguments over feeding kids in school holidays and 9.5m tonnes of food waste a year existing in uneasy, unexamined cohabitation. Food banks are running out of supplies and Iceland is offering “food microloans”. Meanwhile, Salt Bae’s restaurant, home of the £1,500 gold-coated steak (a juicy anecdote for future historians) made £7m profit in its first three months. I’m no austerity fetishist, extolling the virtues of tinned pilchards: no one should go hungry in Britain today, hundreds of thousands do and the responsibility lies squarely with this government. But I find some salve for my gnawing “state of the world” dread in treating finite resources more carefully.
Can we still enjoy food with all we know now? Can I, a person for whom food is the screensaver to which her brain defaults in every idle moment? It might be wiser to learn to treat it as fuel, and be happy with a Huel drip. Instead, I enjoy eating more than ever. To celebrate the near-miraculousness of everything coming together to feed you is, when you think about it, almost a duty. A sacrament even. A tip: the blackberries are incredible this year, fat and sweet. You can’t put them on your hotdog, but you can shove handfuls in your mouth, feel them burst on your tongue, let the juice run down your scratched wrists and exclaim to each other “These would be £5 a punnet in Tesco!” There is still joy in food, perhaps more than ever.
Follow Emma on Twitter @BelgianWaffling
