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.
