Fishy

On Monday night around half past nine there was a knock on the door. This usually means only one thing. We live in a street which has a very similar name to several adjacent streets, and most weeks some semi-literate but over-worked, poorly-paid, and well-meaning person will attempt to deliver takeaway food to us which we haven't ordered. I do my best to be patient, and redirect them from 47 Easy Street to 47 Easy Drive, or possibly Easy Way, with a cheery wave. After all, they have negotiated the various booby traps laid on our front drive in the dark, ignored the "cold callers will be summarily executed" sign, not to mention the tape loop of a pack of angry dogs, all for the sake of handing over a tepid pizza in a greasy box.

But instead, standing there in the dark, was my Filipino next door neighbour, Jay, holding a large plastic bowl, and saying, "Hi, Mike, do you eat fish?" Which was both sufficiently similar to and yet utterly different from the anticipated scenario as to induce a state of severe cognitive dissonance. I reached deep into my reserves of wit, tact, and common courtesy, but the best I could manage was, "Um, what?"

It turned out he had been sea-fishing out near Weymouth, and returned with more mackerel than he, his wife, or even their cat knew what to do with. So, once perception and reality had realigned in my head, I gratefully accepted two plump mackerel, both about a foot long and still with that stiffness and reproachful gaze that are the marks of truly fresh fish.

Now, the simple answer to the simple question, "Do you eat fish?" is "Yes, yes we do eat fish, thank you very much", but that does need some qualification. Most Saturday nights we eat haddock and chips, and most weeks we'll fry up some salmon on one evening. But – and this is the qualification – it has been some time since I last bought whole "wet" fish, in need of gutting and preparation before cooking. It seems few of us do, despite being surrounded by sea on all sides. In fact, it seems most of the catch of our hardy fisherfolk goes to Europe; if it isn't filleted cod or haddock, coated in batter and deep-fried, then this "island race" ain't eating it, mate. You have to wonder why they bother to put that wet-fish counter in the supermarkets, for all the custom it gets.

So, as I sharpened a knife and got busy with those mackerel, a stream of thoughts and memories passed through my mind.

The striking thing about gutting any creature, I think, is how empty the cavity containing its vitals actually is. A few tugs and strokes of the knife, and it's clean and clear, like a ribbed boat or a vaulted roof. When I was a boy, most of my surviving older relatives were country folk, for whom gutting ("drawing"), skinning, and jointing a rabbit or cleaning and plucking a chicken were everyday kitchen skills, as routine as boiling cabbage. One Christmas, my grandfather gave us a brace of pheasants – he'd been a beater that year for the local gentry's shoot – which had to be hung in the larder until they were sufficiently "gamey", then prepared. He delighted in showing me how, by pulling the tendons protruding from the severed legs, the bird's feet could be made to clasp and unclasp. Dead and butchered, it was still a working machine of sorts; an instructive, Frankensteinian horror for a seven-year-old with a precocious interest in natural history.

On the other hand, my mother, who worked nine to five – first in a shoe-shop, later in the admin offices of a department-store chain – was a reluctant cook, at best. She was more than happy to feed us the new "convenience" foods of the 1960s, things like frozen fish fingers and MSG-laced burgers and anything with the word "instant" on the packet. An aspect of modern life that, I'm certain, appalled the mother of a close friend and near neighbour who was a domestic science teacher. When we went on school trips, his packed lunches were full of nutritious, wholesome sandwiches and fruit, never the crisps, sausage rolls, and other tasty processed snacks the rest of us happily gorged on.

But I suppose the main thought I had was about how remote we as consumers in the industrialised countries have become from the real "facts of life". How the ingredients of something as sophisticated as mackerel pâté, bought in a fancy delicatessen, start with a hook in the mouth of a fish, roots and tubers taking their chances with weather and pests beneath the soil, and cows separated from their calves to ensure our supply of their milk. I see no reason to be squeamish or judgmental about any of this, the heritage of thousands of years of hunter-gathering, farming, and peasant life, although the effects of industrialised food production and the over-processing of food "products" on the health of both humanity and the planet on which we depend really should be giving us urgent pause for thought. Vegetarianism is surely not the answer, though, if it means covering the landscape with monocultures, and polluting rivers and the seas with the runoff of pesticides and fertilisers.

The pre-packed meats and filleted fish, the ready-trimmed and washed vegetables in our supermarkets, and above all this turn to a diet of takeaway meals are all a telling metaphor and a reproach. It can't just be a question of being "too busy" to cook anything requiring the preparation of basic ingredients: too busy doing what? What essential, creative labours filled the forty minutes during which your Chinese meal was cooked, packed, and mistakenly delivered to my door, you who live in 47 Easy Way? Do you really not know how to boil rice or make a stir-fry? It seems we no longer see the connection between poor diet, obesity, and ill-health, even though I'm pretty sure my childhood friend's mother could already see it happening back then, sixty years ago. And a major cause of this blindness is simply that we're no longer prepared to get our hands dirty, to do the elementary labour in the kitchen that reconnects consumption to production.

It is a conundrum, though. Industrialised food is a necessity in a hungry, overcrowded world, and cheap food is essential in societies where poverty is systematically priced into the economy. Even if you knew how, you can't grow vegetables living in a flat, and I'm pretty sure the authorities would have something to say if you tried raising and slaughtering livestock at home. It's true, my grandfather did keep a succession of pigs at the end of his garden during and after the war, and they didn't die or end up as bacon, chops, and sausages by accident, but the days of the peripatetic pig-man with his buckets and sharp knives are long gone. And even those of us who do cook daily from basic ingredients depend on supply chains that should induce feelings of disquiet, even guilt. Sugar-snap peas from Kenya? Out-of-season brussels from South Africa?

But mackerel straight from the sea off Weymouth, delivered as a gift from a friendly neighbour! What's not to like? Unless, of course, you either don't eat fish, or know what to do with one. Happily, I do.