Once more unto the feast, dear friends, once more

I have previously referred to the Bendigo Writers Festival in terms of being some sort of feast, but is that warranted?

What do I mean by feast?

this is not a picture of me in training for the bendigo writers festival

I must admit that as a younger man I held appetites of King Henry VIII proportion. Unfortunately, not wanting to antagonise the Gods of Gout has slowed me down these days. It sucks getting old!

But surely there can be more to feasting than a corpulent, flatulent, and ultimately vomitous overindulgence.

Surely it is possible to feast in a genteel and refined manner. To savour and find nuance in subtle flavours rather than just overdose on every fucking thing that you can in some sort of orgiastic frenzy stuff into your fucking body.

In 'An Alphabet for Gourmets', MFK Fisher observes

It is a curious fact that no man likes to call himself a glutton, and yet each of us has in him a trace of gluttony, potential or actual. I cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed himself to the bursting point, on anything from quail Financiere to flapjacks, for no other reason than the beastlike satisfaction of his belly. In fact I pity anyone who has not permitted himself this sensual experience, if only to determine what his own private limitations are, and where, for himself alone, gourmandism ends and gluttony begins. 

Yes. That's it, I shall think of myself as a gourmet rather than just a bogan hedonist. I shall be discerning, subtle, and yet still retain some sort of enthusiasm for living.

I have been in training for this new attitude of moderation for some time now. I have given up meat. Although, my relinquishing of dead animals as part of my diet had more to do with outrage at the industrial practices of production that the poor beasts were subjected to than anything else.

My sense of outrage reached its zenith when I heard that there was such a thing as a chocolate sundae topped with bacon bits. That is just the most perverse trivialisation of a sentient creature I have ever heard of. That is just sick and twisted and capitalism has gone utterly fucked up when that sort of bat-shit crazy stuff starts happening.

So I gave up the pig. I must admit I felt much better for it, and not wanting to be thought of as an elitist speciest I gave up all meat over the period of 18-months.

I don't want to sound condescending to people who still eat meat, but I am a superior moral being to you!

And I am becoming a gourmet. A man of such pretentious outlooks I often find myself to be insufferable.

For example I am now going to shamelessly name drop Elizabeth David.

Elizabeth fucking who I hear the less civilised among us wail in unimaginative unison.

elizabeth david 

Elizabeth David was a food writer extraordinaire. (There's a neat bio-pic on her worth checking out if you can track it down).

And she wrote 

And that is the sort of feast that I imagine myself having at this Bendigo Writers Festival. A smug celebration of simplicity (aka poverty) that may or may not (it bloody well won't) have the occasional infusion of truffle.