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Every few months I leave Cape Town for a weekend and travel back to my home town to see family and friends. Apart from packing bags and making plans, I need to prepare in another way. I need to unclench my fists and take a deep breath. I have to let go of what I’ve become: a fully-fledged food snob.
You see, while I’m there I will have to go without pine nuts, pesto and chevin goat’s cheese. No baby spinach, truffle oil or those mini stroopwaffels I love so much. Not even the Woolies down the road from my parents’ house delivers on these demands.
Don’t get me wrong. Being a food snob doesn’t mean I don’t love a good Steers burger, glass of chocolate pinotage or bag of NikNaks, but I do feel rather strongly about certain things. Read the warning signs below to see if you’re at risk of being a food snob too.
You can’t abide sliced bread
Only artisanal loaves made from slow-fermented stone-ground flour for you. Free from preservatives, your brown-paper-bagged crusty loaves are short-lived, but so worth it. (Read more about the artisan toast trend.)
This precious bundle will never know the horrors of a plastic bag.
Premade salad dressing is an object of derision
That plastic bottle of honey-mustard dressing must just go.
You spend way too long looking at fruit juice labels
Is it just reconstituted cells with added water? Is it mostly pear juice? It is loaded with wheezy-making preservatives?
Freshly squeezed or makes-you-wheeze?
You care a little too much about your coffee
Avert your eyes – and nostrils – from the tin of Ricoffy.
You won’t swallow Wellington’s sweet chilli sauce
Not in public, anyway. When you’ve come home at 2am and you’re making a grilled cheese sandwich, it’s anyone’s game. (You’re not alone – read this blog appropriately entitled ‘Shit I eat when I’m by myself’.)
You abhor white sugar
Only beautiful, caramel-coloured raw granules will ever grace your sugar bowl, because you know that white sugar has been bleached with bone char, also known as cow bones. Yes, really.
No sunflower oil can be found in your pantry
Sunflower or canola oil? Nope, even though it’s been approved by the heart foundation. Only award-winning local olive oil like Morgenster will suffice.
You won’t touch table salt
You will season your food with sea salt crystals alone. Chances are you have a box of Maldon, a fancy Le Creuset salt pot, or a jar of pink Himalayan salt in your pantry.
You haven’t bought instant dip in the last 15 years
You would rather spend three hours grilling and peeling peppers, caramelising onions or shucking chickpeas one-by-one than resort to one of those plastic-lidded travesties. (Read on for more dip ideas to raise your game.)
The joys of skinny (fries) dipping
You think gouda tastes like rubber
Well, not all gouda. Mature gouda and the pale Dutch sweetmilk variety are pretty good. But that orange stuff in supermarkets is fit only to act as a doorstop. (It’s often conveniently shaped in a wedge too.)
Living on the wedge
Only free-range beef or chicken will do
This isn’t really snobbery, it’s more like common sense.
Ditto on the free-range eggs
Yes, they may be besmirched by chook poop, but the difference in yolk colour and flavour is unmistakeable, not to mention the ethical considerations. They’re not even much more expensive.
Gertrude distracted the hens with her winning smile while she escaped with the freshly laid loot
You never drink soup made from a sachet
There’s no nutrition in that powder anyway, and the main ingredients are flour and salt. (Go on, check.) Even the soups that claim to contain chicken seldom have more than five percentage points of actual poultry, and they never say which part…
You won’t buy pre-mix cakes
Gone are the days of those crazily coloured funfetti box cakes. (They were kind of fun, though.) Now you will only accept beautiful buttercream, baked cheesecakes or apple tarte tatin. Or, in a pinch, something like Nomu’s chocolate brownie mix, which is really just the cocoa and flour mix into which you beat real butter.
Tinned white asparagus is horror-film material
This hardly qualifies as snobbery: no-one should be eating this abomination.
Green is for ‘go’
You believe that polony is a crime against humanity – and pigs
You will happily tuck into a charcuterie platter, but won’t go near a slice of polony or a lumo-pink vienna. (Especially if you’ve ever seen what goes into it – it’s eyeballs and a-holes all the way.)
For better or for wors
You won’t eat sandwich spread
Now that you’re a grown up and you can make your own sandwiches, that jar of camel kotch can be relegated to your childhood nightmares.
People are nervous to invite you over for dinner
This is a double-edged sword. It’s lovely if people make an effort, but we all deserve a break sometime – even from being a snob. Homemade anything is always appreciated. (I love you, mom!)
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I don’t know where you are eating in your home town? But there are other parts of South Africa besides Cape Town that do actually have pine nuts and pesto!
Hi Chiara. Of course there are other places besides CT that have those ingredients! It’s just that my home town doesn’t… 🙂
Title edit:…”or signs you’re a chef”
i love your article. All I could think as I read through your list is…This is me!
Great to hear, Roxanne! You’re not alone.
Guilty on all charges but I don’t consider myself a snob. I just want the good stuff 🙂
So-called artisan bread is not good for egg salad and mayo sarmies, padkos for a road trip. Sliced, so-called low GI, or is it high?, brown bread is best. Being picky about coffee is not snobbery, it is medicine.
But I completely understand where you are coming from in all other aspects! And there is nothing wrong with being a snob in terms of food! I would much rather eat freshly made food than all that processed crap!
Most of te criteria fits… but!
I still like Sandwitch Spread.
And sunflower oil of good provenance is a handy thing, no doubt! Sometimes you really don’t need an olive note in your food!
I feel as if this is me speaking! Who are you?? I absolutely love your article! Best is the white asparagus!!
Thanks, Maxine! It’s good to find kindred spirits.
SORRY…………..BUT I’M A SNOB…BUT THANX FOR OPENING MY EYES……
Pretentions circus monkeys that has no idea about the love of food act like above mentioned so called snobs! #get real #keep calm!!
I call it healthy eating – real food. There is nothing snobbish about it.
I did not know I was a food snob, but I agree with all 18!
After reading the ingredients of vienna sausages many years ago, i have since NEVER EVA had another vienna, ditto most of the other ‘bad’ for some reason or another,so- called snob items…more like wise choices???
Hahah that’s me except for the cake mix, love a good cake mix. I even have a mini tin of Malden salt which I take camping with me!
Maldon salt is made from Thames estuary water and is evaporated using gas boilers. Yum. Try West coast sea salt. Made from the sea using the sun.
This is horrifying news! We’ll investigate, thanks Robert. I love that Oryx salt from the Kalahari, too.
Hahaha, “living on the wedge”, loved this! 🙂
This is hilarious!! Love it too much!
Simmy & I are both “it”
I don’t consider myself a food snob because I prefer quality food.
Whether it is soup from a sachet, bad coffee, polony or premade salad dressing( the easiest of any food to make yourself in a minute or 2), quality food DOES taste better.