Beauty of Food

Whenever I covet something—say, a pretty frock—if it’s green, I know I’m in luck. It will sit for months on the selling floor until I swoop in and scoop it up when it’s on sale, just before it’s shipped to a discount outlet in Ohio. Ask any savvy retailer and she’ll tell you: Green does not sell. Black makes people look serious. Red makes them look powerful. White makes them look holier-than-thou. But green mostly makes people look like they’ve just returned from a cruise that hit rough waters.

The branches of the casuarina trees bend under the warm tropical winds, just like the lithe bodies performing sun salutations in this morning’s yoga class led by Miss Saraswati. Here at Parrot Cay in Turks and Caicos – every day a perfect 27 degrees, every afternoon a massage amid the lush vegetation, every evening a glass of rosé in honour of the glorious sunset – tip-tapping away on a laptop is the last thing on one’s mind. However, as Poetry of Food never sleeps, one’s attention must return to last night’s meal: a fine mélange of vegetables and red rice.

When my father was a child, he suffered from various ill-defined illnesses that often kept him tucked away in his warm bed while his fellow classmates recited their Latin. You see, my grandfather Jacob was the school’s principal and he demanded that his son, my father, be the exemplar of high moral character as well as academic excellence. No wonder my father took the only available escape route: his sick bed. During these bouts of infirmity, he refused all food and drink except chocolate-coated gingerbread hearts that his mother would feed him, one by one.

Sweetness is happiness as every child knows. A taste for savoury—runny Bries, dense Bordeaux—that comes later, after a few hard knocks. But sugar, white as a blank page, is the passe-partout to every cheerful room in Instant Comfort Castle. White sugar really ought to be re-named White Mischief, after that Happy Valley Set of fast-living British aristos who ran amok in Kenya. Ain’t life grand—until it ain’t. Processed sugar is now implicated in everything from obesity to diabetes to allergies. Why couldn’t Nature assign this nefarious role to rutabagas?