Food for thought | 7 July 2016

Elisabeth Luard has a fascinating and rich subject in the relationship between food and place. Humans eat differently according to where they live. Their diets both in daily life and in feast-day magnificence are influenced by seasonal and regional availability, sumptuary laws, convention, history and even political diktat. I was in Norway last week, and was repeatedly tempted by the offer of grilled whale, though less so by the pseudo-cheese Brunost or Gjetost. (When a lorry carrying Gjetost crashed and burst into flames in a tunnel in 2013, the load of sugar in the ‘cheese’ fuelled an inferno that the firefighters could not approach for four days.) I’m writing this in Geneva, where there is still a bucherie chevaline within walking distance, and where the ordinary supermarket shelves hold horse steaks, usefully indicated with a silhouette of Black Beauty, as well as the most recherché offal, such as rabbit kidneys.