As a nice contrast from writing out revision notes and calling it a blog, I’m going to talk about food for a bit. This will not only demonstrate that I am a balanced individual with a variety of interests but also hopefully stop phrases like Beauvoirian feminism, the Great Incarceration and Three Phases of Infantile Libidinal Development from cluttering up my consciousness. Since my brain is experiencing the philosophical equivalent of a force 10 gale at the moment (cue: falling trees, thunder, lightning and dooooom), it should help everything feel better, hopefully.
OK, food, now where was I…? Colours, that was it! Have you noticed that the more colours there are in a meal, the better it tastes? The logic seems to work like this. A uni-colour meal has very little flavour, or excitement. Bi-colourity on the other hand can either indicate a fusion of eclectic textures, tastes and olfactory notions (aka smells), or something a little dull.
This leads me to postulate the significance of different colours. A meal which is mostly one shade of green (which we’ll call, for sake of argument, ‘lettuce green’) will generally not be that pleasant and/or exciting. Similarly, with the exception of quiche (see below), beige coloured foods on their own or with only the simplest of additions are, to be frank, quite rank. Anyone who lived with me in year one or two will doubtless have observed the rankness which I addressed by the laughingly polite title of ‘pasta with sauce’ (spaghetti, tomato puree, cheese).
This leaves us with muticolourity (which I think looks better as multicolarity, so that’s what I’ll call it). Multicolarity is a plate and/or dish which contains three colours or more. For example, meat (I don’t know much about this), green beans and yorkshire puddings (or quorn, if you’re one of those, we all know who you are). Similarly, although the outer appearance of quiche is one of uniform brown-and-beige dullness (or black, if you forget its in the oven), inside it is a delicious yummy eggy yellow suffused with whatever your particular penache for pastry-covered dishes happens to be. Cheese on toast, with onions, is a further case in point. And any good salad must have at least three colours. I would indeed be tempted to complain about vegetation selections which did not reach this stringent criteria, since it is wholly likely that they will (a) ming, as the youth of today say, and (b) that they will come in a Fort Knox style polythene container which renders the veggie goodness within unattainable.
At this point I tend to resort to sharp objects and return to the question. It should be stressed that multicolarity can be taken too far. For instance, the addition of certain brightly coloured ingredients to any dish is likely to render them inedible. As a guide, the addition of green mouthwash to plain beige pasta will not liven up the taste-experience, even if you sautee it. Although adding a toothpaste topping to a particularly uninteresting quiche may be a worthwhile experiment.
Potato wedges or roast potatoes should not be livened up with shaving foam. Equally, adding laptop, television, CD-Roms or newspapers to any dishes is to be discouraged, particularly at the preparation stage. The two exceptions to these are fish and chips, which have to be constituted to an approximate ratio of 1 part fish to 3 parts chips to 2 parts soggy papier mache from the newspaper which ‘wraps’ them up.
The second example is TV dinners, in which case any level of multicolarity (even to the mouthwash and shaving foam level) will not improve their flavour in any way whatsoever.
Now back to Beauvoir…
