Dr Wamuwi Mbao: Eat to live

I was having lunch with a Swedish historian (it sounds like the start of an eye-roller, but I promise it isn’t). She was relating how once, as an enthusiastic young researcher, she’d found herself on the Faroe Islands being served a sizeable slice of pilot whale. “I didn’t want to lose face in front of my host,” she related, “so I ate it all, as quickly as I could manage.” I’ll spare you the grosser details of this gustatory ordeal (think congealing blubber), but my historian friend said that, once she had cleaned her plate, her host mentioned that she was not, in fact, meant to consume the unpalatably tough whale skin as well.

I think that most of us retain, for good reason, the memories of the best things we’ve imbibed. You can conjure up the exquisitely flaky fragility of your first good croissant, that one that has tinged every subsequent pastry with the mildest hint of disappointment. Memory is what guides us back time and again for that coffee prepared just the way we like it (the coffee chocolatey, the foam luxuriant as the clouds in a Pierneef), and it’s also why we experience that untethering panic when one day the coffee shop has gone and a piano store is in its place.

Equally, for good reason, the culinary sins we’ve endured tend to stain our memories, leaving behind the conviction that such crimes must never befall us again. “Everything about this meal was a mistake,” my wife discreetly coughed into her napkin as we sat in one of our town restaurants having dinner. I asked her whether it had been too cold (poor form), under salted (amateurish), or if something worse had transpired: a rancid hummus, or a potato only briefly acquainted with the transformative heat.

All she would admit — her greatest desire is to not burden others with the knowledge of their own incompetence — was that the ingredients had combined in violent argument to form something too evil to ever speak of again. I couldn’t blame her for suffering in silence. I hate to make a fuss. I can count on one hand the number of meals I’ve sent back.

Once, when a trendy city eatery laced my meal with enough salt to rival the Dead Sea, I had shortened my life expectancy with three mouthfuls before I plucked up the courage to summon the waitron, who immediately agreed and whisked the saline sorrow away. Why was I prepared to continue eating it?

On some level, my fear of returning food has its roots in the subliminal sense of self-consciousness I feel when dining out. You know the feeling. Your “Tofu Chateaubriand” arrives and the server dribbles a moat of brandy around it and sets the whole thing aflame. You bask in the glow, everyone appreciates the artistry, and it feels churlish to spoil the show by snagging on the fact that the brief but fierce flambéing has only disfigured the tofu rather than induced the desirable flinty crust. Amid the soft clatter of contented knives and forks, a demurral rings out like you’ve just admitted to enjoying the poetry of Eugène Terre’Blanche.

Even though I appreciate every day that living in the maw of the South African epicurean scene means never having to darken the swing-door threshold of a Wimpy, I still feel the guillotine tickling at my neck hairs when I complain about a substandard meal. I can’t help but remember that eating well is a privilege at a time when war-stoked famines loom over places such as Sudan.

The luxury of being able to pick from a bevy of establishments in which to be leisurely and convivial with my favourite set of happy, talkative people always summons up a tinge of guilt. I’ve tried to assuage this feeling by supporting smaller establishments, but this doesn’t always go according to plan. One august waffle house rewarded our patronage by serving me a compote whose berries hadn’t been defrosted yet. Another inner-city diner we frequented — mostly because it looked like Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks transplanted to District Six — was a beautiful venue I remember more for the never-lapsing post-theatre conversations and the eccentric street scenes than for the cast of stoners who seemed to improvise your order so that, frustratingly, you never had the same meal twice.

For some people, the threat of a bad meal is enough to send them into the capacious arms of the franchise restaurants with their bland standardising and middle-of-the-road cuisine. I know people who are unswervable devotees of Spur for this very reason. I suppose that’s one way to ensure you never have to force down whale leather. But surely, some risk is good if it mostly combines the rewards of good dining with wholesome (or pleasantly unwholesome) company?

The writer James Salter had it right when he said, “Life is weather. Life is meals.” In this day and age, perhaps there are none so lucky as those of us who get to complain about our food; few so lucky as those of us who have the privilege to be disappointed. Food is living: its pleasures and sorrows mirror the ups and downs that are the stuff of life. I console myself with this on those odd occasions when things go wrong. It’s the price to be paid for a life of variety. I asked my Scandinavian historian whether she regretted her run-in with the whale. “Not at all,” she replied. “Everything is a lesson.”

Dr Wamuwi Mbao is a literary critic and essayist

• From the July edition of Wanted, 2024.