I want to be a foodie when I grow up

I have kept it secret long enough: I am a closet foodie. So closeted in fact, that I myself didn't consciously acknowledge it until about two years ago. I know, I know ... despite my obsessive ramblings about food on this blog, the photos of food I post, you never guessed.

I've always been fascinated by what people can do with food; by the colours, smells, ingredients, by food writing and especially by food photography. Initially, I think my interest was peaked by Enid Blyton's The Children of Cherry Tree Farm and other tomes of that ilk. Somebody was always sitting down to obscenely decadent teas with buttered scones, fresh bread and marmalade, various and sundry cuts of meat, both cold and hot, always dripping with fat and the ever present sponge cake. I couldn't read those books without having one or two (or five) snacks.

Also spent many a pleasant and hungry hour poring over the pics and recipes in MACO or Island Life. My favourite photos always featured seafood: glazed shrimp or sweet mussels or crab meat and lobster swimming in some rich herbed sauce. Irresistible temptations. Hadn't a hope in hell of finding 3/4 of the ingredients in my mother's kitchen (she's a very, very conservative cook) but I could dream, right? Now there's Google for all unknown ingredients. I hoarded stacks and stacks of colourful magazines, all because of the recipes that I'd never get to try out hidden at the back. The sophisticated home decor that I could never afford didn't hurt the cause either.

But the course of true love never did run smooth. My mother and I have many epic battles to choose from when we want to tell a funny story, but one of the more memorable involved my sister's irrational need for white space, a stack of dog-eared Island Life magazines and me threatening to throw out all my books along with the offending magazines, since she clearly didn't want me to increase my knowledge. Why read at all, I argued. I did win that battle, though. I think the magazines are still where I left them, even though I don't live in that room anymore.

God knows I had no desire to parlay this food love into becoming a chef. No, no, heavens to Betsy no. I enjoy cooking, but only when I really feel like it. Which isn't very often. I much prefer eating, or maybe just staring at a really good plating, trying to figure out how they constructed that tower, or how they carved those cucumbers into bowls. I like tasting elusive flavours and knowing what herbs they used, or how they softened the shadows around the plate for that amazing close up.

So why has it taken me so long to uncover the inner foodie? Simple answer - it was never an option in my before. Even though I had the passion, I never believed that anything would come of my secret food love except dog-eared magazines. I kind of got dampened by the secondary school system that told me all I could do with an A in A level English was teach English. Whoo hoo. No one ever presented other options to me: no one said, "hey, you don't need to be an overworked news reporter to write for a living! You can write about food and women's issues and beauty and fashion too."

Thank God I was determined to find a way to do something I loved, otherwise I'd probably be in some airless, chalk-dusty secondary school classroom torturing the students because of my own frustrated dreams. But what happens to those in school now who are presented with the same limited options, who follow the crowd when their classmates talk about doing masters, LLBs and Phds and all they want to do is write about food? I hope that the Food Network and Travel Channel have sufficiently softened up parents toward the industry, and toward creative industries on a whole. Not everybody is going to dive headfirst into (shudder) law, or medicine. Not everybody is meant to get a Phd in Biochemical Engineering and spend our days in a lab. Moms, dads ... some of us just want to sing, or act, or paint, or write. And eat.

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