Sosmix, one of my very first food memories. While the premise of Sosmix sounds vile: powdered vegan sausage and white fat pellets, reconstituted with boiling water and then shaped into sausages, the taste is something I haven’t forgotten. I could get sentimental and surmise these pappy little oblongs made such an impression upon me because they were cooked by my great grandmother, someone I only knew for a short while. That must of course play a part, but I believe the reality of my enjoyment was the very large amount of salt my great grandmother added to her Sosmix, an ingredient forbidden to me by my own mother, concerned for her little cherubs’ sodium intake. This addition of salt was probably my great grandmother’s attempt to add some sort of flavour to what she called ‘rabbit food’. A child of war times, when meat was scarce, she didn’t understand her son’s desire to turn vegetarian and raise his children the same way.
Indeed, it was unusual to ‘become’ vegetarian at that time, in the 1960s, when meat was the centre of any meal. Even though my grandma still doesn’t eat meat at the grand old age of 86, she has confided in me that she didn’t quite ‘get it’ when grandad proclaimed that meat eating was cruel and that he wanted to stop partaking in its consumption. While non-Western religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism have had long histories of problematising meat eating, the West’s engagement with the issue has been much more recent. The link between eating meat and environmental degradation and global warming being more recent still. Despite my grandma’s reservations it was she, unsurprisingly, in that heavily gendered time, who ended up making most of these vegetarian meals. An uncharted meatless territory coupled with a more general era of 70s space food made for some interesting and let’s say, inventive, meals. My mum tells stories of having to go to the local pharmacy to buy a meat substitute, ‘textured vegetable protein’, a food that looks like dry dog food yet probably contains less flavour. Yes, rather than perusing the abundant shelves of plant-based foods we find in today’s supermarkets, they had to pick up their food sitting on the shelf next to the Vicks vapour rub.
It is no wonder then, that there was no space food in my mum’s most loved childhood meals. Instead, all her favourite childhood meals contain some sort of potato, the most infamous of which was spaghetti topped with chips, topped with tomato sauce, topped with cheese. How exciting that double carb pile topped with fat and umami tomato tang must have been in comparison to overprocessed, underseasoned, space food. Her love of potato informs many of my own childhood food memories: potato smiley faces, potato waffles, jacket potato and McCain’s frozen crinkle cut chips deep fried in the little fat fryer. It wasn’t all beige root tuber though. Instead of relying on a lump of meat to carry a meal, my mum (and dad) relied upon abundant herbs, spices, garlic, lemons, nuts and seeds to pack flavour and texture into our meals. Vegetables were not the afterthought of a dutiful parent trying to meet their child's 5-a-day but were instead the main event. Where my classmates hadn’t heard of, let alone eaten, an aubergine, I was lucky enough to have had these vegetables in my life from as early as I can remember. Don’t get me wrong, the majority of our meals were simple like any tired, busy parent’s meals are (read: a lot of pasta). However, I believe that it was exposure to so many different ingredients (converse to what many meat eaters may think about a vegetarian diet) that fostered my obsession with taste.
We were always given great creative freedom in the kitchen as children. I sometimes wonder whether the lack of meat with its corresponding heightened food fears led to my mum being more laissez faire about us cooking on our own. My first memory of ‘cooking’ was making soup. I place cooking in quotation marks because this cooking consisted of opening a can of Heinz tomato soup and heating it in a saucepan on the stove top. Although not a culinary masterpiece, I remember how exciting it was to be trusted to use the sharp can opener and grown up stove. This element of danger, element of the illicit, sense of autonomy only made that tomato soup taste sweeter.
A scooby snack was another one of my early food creations; a giant layered sandwich, each layer different: pickles, houmous, cheese. It got its namesake from Scooby Doo the cartoon, which my sister and I loved to watch. I’ve always remembered the towering sandwiches being Scooby’s favourite snack of choice but looking it up upon writing this article it appears it was Scooby’s human brother Shaggy’s favourite. It’s interesting how time can rewrite old realities.
Soon enough I graduated onto more difficult dishes. By teenagehood I was cooking full on banquettes. Extensive mezes with smoky baba ganoush, homemade flatbreads, stuffed vine leaves rolled by hand, courgette fritters with tzatziki; fresh raviolis stuffed with pumpkin and amaretti biscuits; rava dosas with pounded chutneys. At the weekends I would pour over the food supplements taken from my parent’s newspapers. Every birthday and Christmas, family and friends would get me food related presents: kitchen appliances, cookbooks, meals out. I lived and breathed food. However, this obsession did not stop with me, it is shared with my sister and my cousins, who have, too, been brought up vegetarian. Watching us giddy with excitement at the prospect of our family feasts my Uncle often asks why it is that we are so obsessed with food. I’ve been pondering this and believe that it is our vegetarian upbringing that has made us so. A vegetarian upbringing introduced variety into our diets; variety of ingredients, tastes and textures. Not relying on a lump of meat meant we weren’t on auto-pilot when it came to cooking, it made us think about, cook with and eat food more creatively and with more fervour.
It is this aspect of variety and taste that I think is sustaining today’s increased uptake and commitment to plant-based diets. While the main drivers of this change are undeniably for ethical and environmental reasons it would take only the most ideologically committed people to exist only off the bland, freeze-dried food of my mother’s youth. Luckily, access to and knowledge about tasty vegetarian food has exponentially improved. In the UK, or in our cities at least, we now have access to a multitude of cuisines from across the globe, where plant-based food has been a steadfast part of these food cultures for many years. Where once, vegetarians had only the predictable and paltry offering of lonely vegetable risotto or mushroom stroganoff to look forward to on a restaurant’s menu, many restaurants now proudly state that they are vegetable focused. A more diverse world of vegetables is now here for us to enjoy in the UK. I can only thank my family for choosing to feed me that way. It is because of my vegetarianism that I believe I have a lifelong love affair with food.
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