Here’s a thing: last weekend we had a food-related party, swapping jams, chutneys and so on. Yesterday I caught up with some newspapers from a few weeks ago, and found an article relating to people living in the country, with ‘any social occasion’ (including meeting at the school gates) resulting in frenzied jam swapping.
The part of the paper this was in has two regular columns – one is a country perspective (written from someone who seems to have started living in the country more recently, and at times is rather bemused by it), another a very townie perspective (particularly that week’s one, where life anywhere other than in London is treated with a certain suspicion).
Nothing new, eh, but given that most of us swapping jams etc live in or near cities, I wondered if that makes us city bumpkins? Perhaps there’s a lot of us in that situation – we may have grown up in smaller places, have come to the city to study or work. Several years on, here we still are, enjoying a lot of the benefits of the larger place but hankering after some of the aspects of smaller places, such as being a bit closer to nature.
Maybe instead those of us who got together are foodies, or environmentalists, or both, responding to this particular economic phase: looking at the recession, natural resources reducing and so on, and having a spot of home production to go with it. Or it may be a stage in life, if trying to feed growing families. (Maybe we can get a group grant from Good Housekeeping, or the Guardian, if we feel particularly self-righteous about it…)
Maybe it’s part of (early?) middle age – enjoying the little things in life, simple pleasures like watching the colour of elderberries as they’re cooking away; doing a task that allows you to slow your brain down a bit. Maybe it’s the belated fun of the pick ‘n mix – swapping things means that I get to try other people’s food that maybe I wouldn’t have thought to make, or to sample something new amid the other familiar items.
For my part, it’s also part of a growing desire to be creative – to make things, have fun doing so, and share a bit of that with others, particularly if they enjoy that too. Yes, I’m doing it in part to avoid too much Christmas present shopping later, but also because I like the process of making things – particularly food-related things.
All of the above. But what matters this weekend is that the apple chutney I made in September is now tasing very good with cheese…