Naughty food

Mmmmm. A melting middle chocolate sponge pudding with a cheeky dribble of cream and a titillatingly-rounded dollop of particularly scrummy ice-cream, with everything just beginning to ooze into one another. Or possibly a banoffee cheesecake, with a few chopped caramelised walnuts (or maybe pecans) strewn all over the place. I could go on...

Students don’t usually indulge in such culinary luxury for many valid reasons such as cost, health and time. Food is a dull necessity that, as busy people rushing all over the place, is often forgotten until we’re too tired to resist giving in to a takeaway late in the day. But it needn’t be thus. Food can be enjoyable, fun, even naughty.

Now the concept of ‘naughty food’ is nothing to do with feeling guilty about the worrying number of chocolate bar wrappers building up in your pocket, or ordering some solidified grease masquerading as garlic bread.

It is running – literally running, for excitement and joy are very important with naughty food (and to a certain extent food generally) – to Somerfield for crisps, dip and wine with your dining accomplice/s in the evening while waiting for the main course to cook.

It is trekking all over York at night after a very tasty but slightly unsatisfying meal at El Piano to look for a (non-dairy-free) pudding to take back to halls and consume. It could be just sinking one’s teeth into literally something – in the words of Blackadder’s Lord Flashheart – “firm and fruity”.

The element of impulse is the crucial factor; eating a banana in a sleazily suggestive way is just a bit wrong, and does not qualify. But really fancying a banana (no innuendo here at all) when one would not usually, finding one and then eating it (suggestively or not); that is naughty food.

I shall now explain the question of the ‘breaded naughty’. On experiencing a craving for some sort of junky snack, instead of saying “battered sausage”, for this was probably what I meant, I declared my desire for a “breaded naughty”.

The English students among us will start banging on about phallic symbols, and in doing so would be correct to some extent, because naughty food can be, and indeed should be, rather like sex; in both cases, an element of naughtiness must be kept in mind, for it is much more fun.

Anyway, it wasn’t so much the sausage that was desired, but the gratification of a whimsically naughty want offered by said sausage. Hence the vagaries of the articulation of the desire.

The naughty food ought to be consumed in company. This is because food is nicer in company anyway, and also discovering someone shares your slightly strange and impulsive food desires can be quite self-affirming, and helps to rid any suspicions of insanity in oneself.

Again, like sex, consuming naughty food alone (if you know what I mean) may be enjoyable once or twice, but can become a very sad habit, and no longer good ‘naughty’, but bad ‘naughty’.

It is probable that naughty food is so enjoyable because most of what one wants in or from life cannot be gratified instantly. In contrast, partaking in the enjoyment of naughty food, where desires are particularly vivid and often totally random, allows us to successfully act upon clearly understood desires for nothing other than sensory enjoyment.

This can be compounded by collectively enjoying naughty food, for simple group pleasure is worth more than the sum of its parts. Naughty food should be enjoyed, not for nourishment, or as one of your five-a-day (though these may be happy coincidences), but just so you can say “mmmmmmmm”.

On a different note, if one had to categorise a yum-yum and a doughnut in terms of similarity, would you agree with my associate Mr Houlders that they are non-identical twins, or with me, maintaining that there is sufficient difference in terms of texture and glazed/non-glazed sweetness to warrant them being only step-siblings?

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