Opening my newspaper the other morning, my eyes fell on the seeming revelation that Gwyneth Paltrow has renounced so-called clean eating, the deeply pious and frequently rather dumb food “trend” for which we must hold her at least partly responsible, in favour of such out-and-out devil foods as pizza, pasta, bacon, butter and cheese. Her new cookbook, It’s All Easy, the piece informed me, even includes a recipe for carbonara, a dish, death by carbohydrates, that is the clean eater’s idea of pure evil, to which we might like to add an extra egg yolk for “creaminess”.
At first, I struggled to process this news. It was harder to digest than Gwynnie’s celebrated Body Builder Smoothie, a “recovery beverage” comprising whey protein powder, greens powder (Google it, would you?), unsweetened, vanilla-flavoured almond milk, a third of a banana and a pitted date. All day, I walked around in a daze, wondering what her disciples would do now with their spiralisers and their chia seeds, their greens powder (what did it say?) and their giant vats of chickpeas (NB: the brine may be whipped with sugar to make vegan meringues).
But then I came to my senses. One egg yolk does not a normal human being make. Turning to the book itself, the evidence mounted. The “fried rice” that is really cauliflower pulsed to the size of couscous. The “crisps” that are made of beetroot and baked. The chocolate mousse that involves, God knows how, avocado. Online, I found a rhapsodic interview with GP in which she was asked to name her favourite recipe in the new book. “God, that’s so hard,” she said. “There are some miso-glazed turnips that are incredible.” No, your honour, It’s All Easy does not signal the beginning of the end of clean eating or anything like it; Ella Woodward, the Hemsleys et al may sleep easy in their beds a while yet.
But what if she had given it up? What would this have meant? The answer, I’m afraid, is: absolutely nothing, beyond the predictable opportunity for mockery. If we’ve learned anything at all in the past 20 years, a period during which our relationship with food has grown ever more bizarre and dysfunctional, it is that the effect of the cookbooks that shift in such vast numbers (Jamie Oliver is Britain’s second biggest selling author after JK Rowling) on the way most people eat is negligible. In the same week that Paltrow’s supposed volte-face was reported with such febrile excitement, Mars announced it is to introduce new labels on products such as its Dolmio sauces to help shoppers distinguish between “everyday” foods and those, high in sugar and salt, which should be eaten ideally only once a week.
In 2016, the vast majority buy not ingredients, but the bare components of a meal – fusilli, red gloop, maybe some grated cheese – and quite often just the meal itself, sealed in plastic. This is the case at both ends of the market. A recent survey revealed that one in 10 of those who own shiny new copies of popular cookbooks never opens them. Presumably, these are the same people, well-off and aspirational, who are willing to lavish seven quid on a Charlie Bigham’s lasagne, to be heated up at home in a vast, gleaming kitchen, most of whose state-of-the-art equipment they use only marginally more frequently than their land line.
Cookbooks used to be plain, almost ascetic things: no pictures, no breathless preamble, no rambling account of the view from the kitchen window (“the box hedges are dusted with snow, like icing sugar”). Elizabeth David’s first two, published at the beginning of the 50s, were illustrated by the artist John Minton with line drawings that were beautiful but distinctly un-pornographic. An elegant form of punctuation rather than an inducement to stuff yourself, they had nothing whatsoever to do with “lifestyle”.
But then, in those days, people still had skills, if not necessarily (budgets, rationing) the wherewithal much to experiment. The photographs in 21st-century cookbooks – and the acres of white space that surround them – are a substitute for the practice of cooking, or an excuse for it. Paltrow’s book, like all those that incorporate the weasel word “easy”, carefully avoids any mention of the labour involved in preparing almost any halfway decent dish: the nearest she comes is to refer to it, in the manner of Marie Antoinette playing at milk maids, as “grounding”. However, and this says it all, she does tell us, in some detail, how to make cheese on toast.
So, you can’t do it (make bread/pasta/anything from the latest Ottolenghi), but you can gawp at it, fantasise about it, make a fetish object of it. Hey, you can stare at it even harder than you do at your mobile. All this certainly begins with our collective inability to bone a chicken, to stare a lemon sole firmly in the eye, but it connects to other things, too.
As food has become more plentiful and cheap, it has grown ever more fraught with anxiety, even danger. Perhaps staring at pictures of it, whether cooked up by a sugar-phobe like Paltrow or a good-time girl like Nigella, is a way of soothing ourselves; on the page, as on television, it can’t harm us. Even more dispiritingly, it has to do, I think, with our increasing tendency to live our lives at one remove: the gym rather than the park; a text rather than a conversation; a tube of Pringles in front of MasterChef. I own lots of cookbooks and sometimes I even use them. But there are times, too, when looking at their lovely spines makes me mournful. If we each of us knew just eight proper, wholesome recipes by heart, the world be a better, happier place.