‘The fridge is a holding cell. Fresh food dwells there, incarcerated in death row. That’s the short life it enjoys’

Picture a neurotic with a gallon of disinfectant. He tires as he scours the kitchen, trying to restore it to a tarnished glory. Brillo pads and j-cloths. A fear rises up within him: he is starting to feel peckish. But what about his art display? He forgets he is to the foreground of its scape.

Food is the enemy. It leaves a filthy mess and has no place in any civilised kitchen. It is a transient of taste that gets chopped, cooked, consumed. No matter how patient might be pasta, it will soon be dragged out and plunged into boiling water. Then devoured and forgotten, like all the rice and potatoes and couscous and quinoa ever eaten.

Meat, fish, vegetables: leeches of cuisine. Fresh, frozen, canned, pickled, dried: ingredients live in a long list. But that list is really a queue and those foodstuffs face a violent fate: consumption. The fridge is a holding cell. Fresh food dwells there, incarcerated in death row. That’s the short life it enjoys.

Polite folk may agitate their wine: “This fare is simply delicious,” they say, regardless of the truth. “You must give me the recipe.” Those recipes come from books that get torn, dog-eared and caked with food. With time, they increase in thickness and eventually, coated in spillage, they become almost edible sample books for the meals they originally described. But, unlike the food, they are at least part of the infrastructure that survives: the pots and the pans. The cracked plates. The wooden spoons with dry rot. The sieves showing signs of strain. These inedible things are a kitchen’s determinants; its means of production; its twisted train tracks that transit cargo into your gut.

In any museum of meals, the closest food would get to any display cabinet would be as a plasticated mock-up of an overflowing plate. It would sit behind glass and the greasy finger marks of the unsatiated voyeurs who might hungrily frequent such a tasteless place.

The key exhibits would be rusting iron, dented aluminium and blunted knives. Burnt-out kettles and warped formica. The museum would be a place of bread saws, tired peelers, stained chopping boards and bloodstains. Maybe empty vats of Jif or Europeanised Cif used by the taxiodermised neurotic in paragraph one. Memory of food fades. The machines and their stains live on.