Certain conversations stick in the mind: the bad news from the doctor; the first “I love you”; the time I told Auntie B I thought I was having a total mental breakdown and she leaned over and said: “You know what you need to do? The washing-up.” (Auntie B is very much of the “idle hands make the devil’s work” school of thought, in which nearly any personal problem can be cured by more housework or prayer.)
One such conversation returns to me regularly. At university, a classmate claimed never to have eaten a ready meal or convenience food. “Not even oven chips?” I asked, agog.
“I very rarely eat chips, Coco,” she said, firmly. Her argument was that it was false convenience. The time it would take to do a ready meal and let it stand is the same it would take to boil pasta and add pesto.
I think about that often – in the supermarket after work, exhausted but knowing that the fridge is empty. I scan the rich variety of prepped meals and I hear her voice, before wondering if I should settle once more for pasta-pesto. Would it make me more virtuous?
The truth is, eating healthily and home-cooked all the time is knackering. I wish I had put it to my classmate back then that perhaps her wealthy family had more time; maybe having a cleaner meant chores could give way to food prep.
Instead, the shame sank in and stayed. But I am learning to decouple the guilt from food. A few days ago, I took a packed lunch to work – cheese sandwich, packet of Skips, banana. There was a brief moment when I felt embarrassed lifting the lid, comparing it with my colleague’s pulses and roasted veg. And she did look and judge, but perhaps not in the way I feared. “Skips, eh?” she said. “Can I have one?”
