The writer supports
The Hope Exchange, a group of people who provide food for the homeless in Cape Town. Please help them
When I was a child, around 7, we lived next door to a large family in London. I liked to visit neighbours, anything to get away from my own family. There was something different about this family. Even at a young age, I could tell.
One evening I tottered in and the woman next door was lighting candles with her hand over her eyes. She then started singing in a strange language.
I rushed home to tell my ma. “It sounds magical,” my mother said. It turned out they were a Jewish family who had escaped to London to avoid the Holocaust. She cautioned against eating too much of their food. “They have been through a terrible time, and need all the food they can get.”
Once upon a time, John Cleese asked: “If God did not intend for us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?” Which of course, implies a belief in the heavenly father if you were to use this to make a point. Denis Leary kept it broad with “Not eating meat is a decision. Eating meat is an instinct” – one of his tamer quotes on the matter, even when taking satire into consideration, and Leary has never shied away from being confrontational and controversial – while the ever-opinionated Fran Lebowitz said, “Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.”
I remember the first time I tasted “real” cheese. In our house cheese was a Trump-coloured block that was mainly grated over macaroni to give it some taste. We were poor. I was still at school and one day a friend and I decided to sail to Robben Island in a homemade boat with horrifying consequences, but that is another story. Once on the island beach she said, “Hey, I’ve got something.” It was a tin of Camembert, a tin. The cheese was the colour of pinchbeck and it tasted furtive, as sin or sex might taste.
It was only years later living in London that I would taste it again: Camembert, Brie, a cheese, the name I forget, that was like crunching caterpillars. Yep, I was a cheese eater, I loved its completeness. One slice and a piece of bread and you had a meal.