It might seem odd but I, a convinced atheist, have recently completed a 10-day fast based on the Hindu festival of Navratri, which is being celebrated this week. These days, if we limit what we eat, it is almost certainly because we are trying to lose weight, detox or realise some kind of health benefit. The idea that we might seek to forgo certain foods for moral improvement seems bizarrely anachronistic.
ReadWe have taken our places. This evening’s performance, sold out months in advance, is about to begin. The programme, handwritten in a traditional script on a rolled parchment, tied with string, tells us to expect a prologue, two chapters and an epilogue, without interval. I’m nervous with anticipation but I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that it’s not because I am waiting for the curtain to rise on a Wagner opera or a Shakespeare play. I’m actually waiting for my dinner.
ReadThe question I wanted to chew over with the chief executive of the Soil Association, Helen Browning, is whether “organic” as we have known it has had its day. For all the good the movement has done in challenging the most egregious practices of modern industrial farming, take any key issue on food and farming today and you will find that it’s never simply a case of conventional bad, organics good, or even better.
ReadI am sitting at a table that doesn’t exist. I wanted to eat out at a table 13, defying superstition ahead of tomorrow, the third Friday the 13th in this unusually inauspicious year. But it’s hard to find one. Only two of the UK’s 14 best restaurants have a table 13, most simply skipping from 12 to 14. Here at Le Gavroche, the closest I can come is to dine at table 12a, a kind of phantom table 13, the cursed spot that dare not speak its name…
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