Food inglorious food
That recent football food survey was bang on, at least on the
bad and ugly front. For among the dross was one of the all-time nasties. The ground will
remain nameless, but see if you can spot the culprit. Try thinking Gulag food. Try
thinking bubbling oil. No, not virgin olive oil. I mean the well and truly f***ed stuff.
Straight out of incontinent bowels of The Sea Empress. Even chance you’d end
up with a slickened gannet. Probably better than a barking beefburger, anyway. The club
should really tell the RSPB when they’re playing at home. Smoked salmonella? No
problem. Diet dysentery? Yours at two quid a shot. Imagine a culinary version of the Piper
Alpha disaster and you’ll know whom I mean. And it looks as if we’re going back.
The prospect is almost Pavlovian.
One guy in the survey described his burger as sliding down
his throat ‘on a slick of grease’. He added that the cheese element clung to his
teeth ‘with the tenacity of Evostick’. That sounded appetising by comparison.
And a few more got their come-uppance, too. Wembley cuisine was justifiably rubbished
(‘…it would be a better idea to eat your seat and sit on your food’). No
‘Royale’ burgers at Reading, either, it seems (‘.. it filled a hole but so
does a landfill site’). The Manor’s hotdogs were described as ‘miserable
things…fitting snugly in the palm. It seemed a crime to eat them, so we
didn’t.’
Now, I’m no prude when it comes to junk food. The
greater the E’s, the more I’m aroused. At college, I resurrected the Marie
Antoinette diet. The vitamin-free Swiss roll extravaganza. Not so much a pick-me-up as a
lay-me-out. Like Ben Elton, I’ve eaten cornflakes with water (hot, if I was in a
gourmet mood). That is, when the milk has run out. And when I’m pissed. Did you know
that the cornflakes box is more nutritious than its contents? They’ve proved it, with
rats. I wonder if they put Riboflavin in the box? Anyway, fresh fruit and veg then
recoiled from me then as if I was the Antichrist. Naturally, I was first person to
contract scurvy since the voyage of the Discovery.
But football food doesn’t have to be that bad. I thought
that the Walsall stuff was pretty good. After hearing the plaudits for the Cambridge bacon
rolls, I’m quite keen to give them a go. Perhaps, there is life after relegation.
Football catering represents the sternest challenge to the Health
of the Nation. What we need is a radical response. How about fat-fuelled cars? Now,
that’s an idea. Run your car off your beer gut. That’d change everything around.
It would junk our notions of the perfect body. Keanu Reeves or Kate Moss may be fine, but
useless on a long journey. No, Richard Griffiths or Dawn French is whom you’d need;
though they’d be half the people they were by the time you’d got home. Lard
pumps would start springing up. Cheesecake would become tax deductible. There’d be a
colossal range of fat goods and the cheap imitations, too, like I Can’t Believe
This Is Not Blubber. Off you’d go for 1000 lasagnes in preparation for a
long-haul trip. You might need an in-car fat-drip, too. And what a difference this world
would make to the nameless club. Instead of being nutritional pariahs, they’d become
as respectable as any toffish health farm. Environmentalists would be dead chuffed and
public health experts would be in a right quandary. ‘Be hard. Eat lard’. Instead
of lipo suction we’d have fat implants. Aerobic classes would collapse everywhere.
Grazing would become our number one activity. It makes you look at a skip of doughnuts in
an entirely different light, doesn’t it? Certainly, food for thought.
Tim Quelch
April 1998
