Foods that make me feel sick.

‘Jam tarts!’ She said, my mother in an excited, breathy voice, her dark eyes wide and shiny, the words hushed as if not permitted to be said out loud. ‘Jam tarts!’ A naughty food, not really allowed but I’m going to get one today if I eat all my dinner. They were nice at first but over time, my relationship with jam tarts soured.

Dinner, the dreaded word, school dinners, tea at a friend’s house, even worse. Somebody is going to put an unregulated plate of supposed edible stuff in front of you and they’ll be wearing a facial expression which suggests they are very pleased with this culinary offering and they think you’ll enjoy it. How wrong, and this enthusiastic facial expression typically makes the whole thing a lot more stressful since there is the added risk of offending them if you don’t eat it. 

The likelihood of the child version of myself enjoying dinner at somebody else’s house was close to zero. How I used to dread sitting at the table seeing those plates piled up with brown stuff, green stuff, slimy, smelly, steaming, frothy, questionable goo. The flavours playing out like an overwhelming cacophony of badly tuned instruments hammering on my tastebuds. The textures like a fast ride over steep terrain, sinking sands and filthy watercourses causing a sort of motion sickness and bubbling inside my mouth so that I could barely breathe. I observed in dismay my childhood friends enjoying these ghastly offerings.

And then the eyes, all looking at me. I used to glance at the scant amount of food left on the other plates, they’d eaten so much more than me. How had they achieved this? It tastes DISGUSTING.

I had a way of cutting the food up very small and then pushing it into a compressed mountain, exposing as much empty plate surface as possible but people see in three dimensions, grown-ups know how much has been consumed and how much is left. ‘Oh, don’t you like it?’, ‘Aren’t you hungry?’

I didn’t like anything, except potatoes, plain bread, biscuits, small amounts of cheese, an apple, carrots, sweets. The flavour and texture of meat was in all ways completely unpalatable to me, the texture and smell of boiled eggs, a form of torture. At school I was forced by a big lady with dark brown, bobbed hair to put roast beef into my mouth. I chewed and chewed it into tiny little pieces and then, in silence, carried my tray and plate, scraped it into the pig-bins, stifling a heave. Now with puffed out cheeks I ran down to the oak trees at the bottom of the playground and spat it out. Grey-brown bits, covered in bubbly saliva sitting in the soil, compacted by hundreds of little Clark’s shoes.

My mother took me to the doctors. ‘She won’t eat, I’m worried that she won’t grow properly. She doesn’t seem to like anything.’

‘Just keep putting meals in front of her, the same food that the rest of the family eat. If she’s hungry and there are no other options, she’ll eat it.’

No I won’t. I’d sooner wither away into a skeleton than eat meat, eggs, cabbage, peas, spaghetti bolognaise, stew, quiche, curry, whatever other strange concoctions posing as human food you care to offer me. 

I want to make it clear that this was not anorexia. It wasn’t in my mind but instead my physiology. I never tried to avoid eating for the sake of limiting my food intake. This was about the overly complicated, strongly flavoured food being offered. I was quite happy to live on potatoes, carrots and plain slices of bread but the adults were not having it.

Now back to the jam tarts. The ones my mother used to bake were tiny little ones with home-made pastry and proper jam. The pastry was savoury and often a bit burned on the outside which contrasted nicely with the sweet jam, proper jam; they were quite okay, palatable. Then my mother got busy, working and she started buying them, Mr Kipling jam tarts or perhaps supermarket own brand. She seemed to think the yellow ones were the best. The jam was different, the pastry was an invertebrate version of my mother’s and the same sweet, soft texture as the thick jam, the effect was an overly sweet, cloying assault on the palette. After that it disappeared into the body and caused its own havoc. No good ever came of consuming shop bought jam tarts.

There were a few more options in terms of treats for ‘afters’, a sweet gastronomic reward, as long as you ate most of your dinner. Jaffa Cakes, I always thought were very odd but I ate them simply out of respect for the person who invented them. It’s unfathomable that they would combine citrus flavoured jelly with sponge cake and dark chocolate, the audacity, the self-belief is very admirable. Penguin Biscuits, I would only eat the green ones. They were quite horrible, sickly, made from brown crumbs stuck together with palm oil and a pinky brown oil slick in the centre. I liked the packaging although now I see it’s all gone cheap and cartoony, just like our lives. 

My grandmother was a highly accomplished baker and every Sunday she would produce an afternoon tea sophisticated enough to rival a retro version of The Savoy. She made sandwiches with ghoulish fillings from my nightmares; crab, ham and slices of wet, wishy-washy orange tomatoes, fish paste (sorry what is this, scrapings from the floor of the Whiskers factory?), meat paste (okay, I know it’s not poison but this really could be absolutely any mammalian DNA), a plain cheese sandwich cut into quarters, just for me; there was way too much butter and the cheese cut too thick but I would eat it for a quiet life.

Then there were the cakes, sponge cakes a foot high, made with fresh whipped cream, usually a chocolate one and a Victoria type. I liked cakes but these were so intimidating with doilies underneath and adroitly sifted icing sugar on top, perfectly risen with no lumps or bumps or broken edges. My grandmother had weaponised afternoon tea, she had transformed it from something gentle, delightful and twee into something threatening which must be endured. Worse still, once it was over she always gave me twenty pence and a Double Decker which she seemed to think I should eat straight away.

I’m much better now. I eat every kind of vegetable, dairy products, beans, lentils, omelettes although there are still lots of foods I won’t touch or even try, including meat and most fish. I have been fortunate in having children who have been far less fussy eaters than I was. 

What I do know is that children who are extremely picky eaters are not doing it for attention. Other parents love to make judgy comments like, ‘Well my kids only get one option and if they don’t eat it they go hungry.’ In these cases their children do eat what is presented most of the time and that’s why it’s not an issue. For my poor mother, I really didn’t eat it, I couldn’t and on the occasions when I was forced to eat foods I found unpalatable, I vomited. We settled on a few limited meal options, they weren’t always particularly healthy and they were usually followed by jam tarts, Jaffa Cakes or a Penguin, all of which make me feel sick now. 

First world problems perhaps but I think sometime during the seventies and eighties, we perhaps went a bit too far in processing and over-complicating our plentiful food supply.