Here's one for the tree-huggers...
Table talk - Food & Drink.
By AA Gill*
The United Nations department responsible for Third World agricultural development has just produced a thoughtful and exhaustive report in favour of GM crops, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. It has concluded that staple crops that double-yield in shorter growing seasons, allowing for two or more harvests a year and, most vitally, to dispense with the need for wasteful, expensive and polluting fertilisers or pesticides, are a good thing. And GM, if it does all it promises, unarguably is a good thing - though naturally (or rather, unnaturally) that doesn't mean some folk won't pick an argument.
The report has been met by a chorus of wailing from that discordant choir of knit-your-own-world groups who think that another word for poverty is diversity and that crippling hard work, ignorance and constant fear are precious customs that need protecting. The great, unfocused, irrational green movement has itself in a bind about GM, because GM crops promise to do so much that's beneficial. It's just unfortunate that they're made by the wrong people, in the wrong place, for the wrong reasons.
I can't think of anything as chronically hypocritical as the queues outside First World, urban, organic health-nutter shops, where young, rich folk, in awe of some fairy-tale Third World way, spend fortunes trying to eke another couple of years out of lives that are already twice as long as the global average. The multinational green business is more totalitarianly prescriptive, deaf, blind and self-righteous than any industrial conglomerate. While you seek out organic, fair-trade bikinis for some poorer beach this year, remember that your absolute belief that progress is a bad thing will actually starve a lot of people to death. Opposition to GM isn't caring scepticism, it's fashionable colonialism. It keeps them where they are, so you can continue to choose to be where you are.
I'm sorry: none of that's particularly funny or entertaining. I mention it because, this week, we patronised the Organic Cafe Grill and Bar, and I don't want you to be under any illusions about where I stand on this sort of thing.
The Organic Cafe is a duly spartan room, set in the Goethe Institut on London's Exhibition Road: a street built and named for the Great Exhibition, which was a huge celebration of industrial and agricultural innovation.
So, a little touch of irony there.
As we entered, I picked up a leaflet. This is the sort of place that can't just have a menu, it must also have a mission statement. I wish I had space to reprint this bog-paper missive in its entirety. It reveals that the cafe is part of a chain, which, naturally, includes a health-food shop in Notting Hill, and is certified by the Soil Association - though not, unfortunately, by two psychiatrists. Its cushions are organic cotton (which, by the way, is fantastically wasteful of water and land) and are coloured with low-impact dye, which seems to mean Indian indigo - so just the same as your multinational exploitative jeans.
The glasses are recycled, the menus are hemp and the bar is "made from storm oak that was literally (as opposed to metaphorically?) bowled over in the great storm of 1987". Why God knocking over a tree should be any more environmentally friendly than doing it with a chainsaw is not explained. Nor is the fact that waiting for extreme meteorology is a lousy way to build furniture. Oh, and the waiters (who are made from reclaimed bits of smiley love and unused facial hair) are dressed in "PC organic T-shirts". Ours had FCUK written on his, which is presumably a sort of expletive recycling.
There's also a printed warning: "Walking in the park, even on the cloudiest of afternoons, can still do potentially lethal damage to your skin, and studies show that sun lotions are toxic." So you're basically buggered either way.
But it's not all bad news. They're going to open a home store where you can luxuriate in organic babywear, nontoxic toys and a range of organic clothing, including underwear: "And yes, hemp can be sexy." This, I imagine, is as close to a joke as an organic cafe in a German arts centre is going to get.
Now the food. Our reversible Brazilian waiter told us that the soup of the day was "gazpacho made with beetroot". Ah, you mean borscht? He looked at us with lovingly endlessly renewable pity. "Bores, what's bores?" Well, I could tell you, but borscht is gazpacho made with beetroot. "Oh really," he said, as if humouring infants. "Our one is gazpacho made with beetroot." It was borscht. Made with beetroot. But without talent.
I had the pasta of the day: penne with pesto. I can tell you exactly what this was like. You know when you were 18 and you went out and got really, really noisomely, flat-faced hammered? And then you brought everyone back to yours for something to eat? Well, this is what you made.
The lemon and rosemary marinated chicken was a shameful waste of the life of a chicken. And I simply had to have a natural cola: "Made organically without any of the nasty chemicals and colouring and stuff."
So water, then?
It was gratifyingly vile, insipid, emetic, ersatz; a greenly pointless exercise. The Blonde kicked me hard when I tried to inquire if the bottled water was recycled by the management or whether they got indigenous hunter-gatherers to do it.
Pudding was a pecan pie made with treacle, a flavour that, while being wholly wholesome, cleverly manages to recycle the savour of petrochemical waste. The coffee tasted as if it were made from acorns - literally blown from the tree that made the bar. The restaurant was virtually - and literally - nearly empty. Yet this simple, careless, uninspired, do-gooder's grub took three hours to serve. Time, also, is apparently recycled.
What was most extraordinary, though, about this finger-wagging, holier-than-thou chapel to abstinence wasn't that it was like eating retread compost-grown Moonies, it was that the Blonde and our guinea pig, Marcelle D'Argy Smith, both thought it was wonderful. "We think it's wonderful," they both said.
If you didn't know this was Soil Association recommended and a heart-warmingly refried mulch restaurant, you'd hate it, wouldn't you?
"Yes," said the Blonde with a faraway smile. "But I do know, and I think it's brilliant. For once, we're eating proper, healthy food.
I can feel it doing me good."
No, you can't.
"Yes, I can."
No, you just think it's doing you good.
"So what's the difference? I also think that eating here is immeasurably making the world a softer place. It's making poor people laugh out loud.
It's putting a wind chime on every doorstep. It's helping small brown babies be born painlessly into caring extended families. It's cloning Nelson Mandela. It's irrigating deserts and hugging rainforests. It's kissing Aids better. It's sending mountain gorillas to university so they can become doctors to cure all the sickness that ever was, using just bits of bark and the juice of an as yet undiscovered fruit. It's growing back female circumcisions, cancelling Third World debt, putting a chicken in every pot (but only if the chicken agrees to it and the pot's handmade). It's giving everyone in Africa a duvet and avocado moisturiser. It's making the whole globe sing and dance in one great magic pop concert, with guest-star humpback whales and liquorice condoms free at the point of delivery.
Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya."
Oh, good grief.
All paragraphs and sentences in this review have been recycled from other articles. Words are free from artificial vowels and chemical consonants, and no grammar was harmed in the writing of this column.
Dispose with care. Have a nice day. Soft fruit loves you right back.
*AA Gill is a features writer and critic for The Sunday Times and GQ magazine and writes regular travel features for The Sunday Times magazine.
What the Papers Say recently voted him Critic of the Year; he is Sunday Times Magazine Columnist Of the Year, has won two Glenfiddich awards for his travel writing and was voted runner up in the 1999 Travelex Travel Writers' Awards for Travel Writer of the Year. He is a contributing editor at GQ and a founder of Travel Intelligence.
He has published two novels, Sap Rising and Star Crossed, was winner of the Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards 1999, and is author of The Ivy Cookbook.
AA Gill has two children and lives in London.
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Originally Posted by Dave Lobster
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