may isle

may isle

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Welcome

Welcome to 'A Frample', a confused tangle of columns, prose poems and lyrics. It's not so much a blog as an online folder, lying somewhere between a drawer and the bin.


Food definitely not for thought



February 20, 2019

“Tam! Tam! Go ben the hoose and fetch yon Box Brownie fae the dresser an’ bring it intae the scullery. Ah’m needin’ a photie o’ ma stew.”

I never heard my great-grandmother say that. Not once.

Over the years I have had to sift through hundreds of family photographs and I haven’t yet seen one of a plate of food. We did have it, food that is, back in the ‘old days’; everyone did. But nobody in my family, or our neighbours, felt the need to photograph what was on their plate.

One of the top toys this Christmas past was, apparently, the unicorn that poos when you feed it.

Now, why any child would desperately want such a plaything is a bit beyond me but it does bring out into the open the correlation between...input and output.

This is, of course, widely understood, from the exhaust and carbon from your car, or the ash from your woodburning stove. And when it comes to the mammalian model anyone who has dealt with a baby knows only too well the direct links between what goes in one end and comes out the other.

Food and fouling are a fact.

So why do people on Facebook keep posting pictures of what they are about to eat?

This angers me so much I have forbidden family from sharing this bizarre behaviour with me.

Of course there are exceptions. Wedding cakes, I suppose, fall into that category but a Victoria sponge wouldn’t. A boar on a spit, arrow through its neck, flaming brandy-soaked apple in its jaws with the caption “All you can eat for £4.99 at Mike’s Medieval Tavern” would be in intriguing. But not everyday ho-hum food, unless, of course, sculptor David Mach whipped out his smartphone to show the world how he had completely recreated the Battle of Thermopylae out of a mushroom risotto and a side salad.

Failing that. No.

The transition from anger to dry boak comes with the photographs of half-eaten food on a plate, that’s just one teeny-weeny step away from showing masticated mush in your mouth. Why not go the whole hog and post a selfie sitting on the toilet giving a thumbs up to the camera.

What is this compulsion to chronicle the digestive journey and then share it with an unsuspecting audience?

As far as the human senses go, food is pretty big on taste. Smell is a biggy too. Touch and sound don’t really score too highly, and then there’s the visual.

Of course recipes books and today’s ‘food porn’ emphasis on presentation have raised the ‘stakes’ somewhat but, I’m sorry, the average casserole, be it stew, goulash, bigos or whatever, is not too photogenic.

So when someone posts that picture with the message “Mmmm. Dinner”, to me it would be as well bunging a toilet roll in the picture, adding “further update later”.

I was shown a post the other day and I genuinely thought a dog had been ill over someone’s knitting: turned out it was a proud snap of a spag’ bol’.

Now some woman somewhere has had her picture go viral on the internet because she took such a slagging over the photograph she posted of her bacon, beans and eggs. Apparently it wasn’t an aesthetically pleasing image.

This came about because she’s a member of some group that shares its culinary exploits – photographically.

Bacon, beans and eggs? Seriously?

The camera never lies, supposedly, but these days it really can blether.



Picture: Sarah Endres




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