Now, normally I wouldn't stop doing anything to a grape, especially a fragolina grape, for an ad, but this was shocking: Jamie Oliver was urging us to be more adventurous with our food, to embrace the unusual, to taste something new every week. Heavens to Betsy, I thought: our best-loved chef and our, um, third-best-loved supermarket combining forces to combat the evil axis of quick 'n' easy recipes and mimsy, rictus-grin, lifelessly cosy meals that have invaded our homes, spreading gustatory ennui. This was ground-breaking stuff.
I should declare my hand here: I've been an advocate of adventurous food for years. Call me pretentious, call me old-fashioned - call me what you will - but I've always thought that the alchemical ingredients of sex, drama, shock and laughter can transform a meal and open a higher plane of sensory pleasure. I watched with bated breath to find out what crazy, life-affirming culinary escapade Jamie was taking us on as the ad drew to its close. As he jumped, slow motion, into a sunlit pond, he yelled "Be adventurous!" and in a wild flurry of culinary excitement we cut to Jamie in the kitchen... and, oh my God... he was only... erm... grating some nutmeg on to his Bolognese.
Woo.
I know, I know, you have to start somewhere. And maybe Sainsbury's had a glut of nutmeg on its hands. But here's how I see it: you'll eat 20 tonnes of food in your lifetime and you'll spend 2,946.62 days (give or take a few minutes) eating, shopping, queueing or hunting for it. That's 16 per cent of your entire waking life. (I worked it out.) Now, you could spend that time making comfort food, eating burgers or even fussing over canapés, but heavens alive, what a waste of a life. We're a nation of dreamers, poets and explorers - surely we should use that valuable time to indulge in wild culinary adventures, like cooking an entire lamb, tasting woodlice and squirrel, or making homemade salami.
I know what you're thinking: there's no way I've got the time (or even the stomach) to make food like that all the time. But I'm not suggesting you should do this every day - just every now and then, when you have the inclination to cook something spectacular; something to remind yourself of how exciting it is to be alive.
The best meals are not necessarily the best-tasting ones - some of my most celebrated suppers have been disasters in culinary terms. What's more important is to make food that you'll remember for the rest of your life. If you've never tried cow-heel soup, headcheese (pig's head terrine), guinea pig or sea-urchin gonads, and if you've never cooked with aftershave or gold, all I can say is don't knock them until you've tried them.
I should also point out that not all culinary adventures need to be complex and time-consuming. The fragolina grapes I mentioned are a heaven-sent cookery-free culinary adventure experienced in the comfort of your own mouth. They look like mean little red grapes, but when you bite into them you discover an astounding consistency that's a cross between a wine gum and a grape, and an insanely intense flavour of strawberry crossed with dessert wine.
Once you start playing with your food it's hard to stop, and it's good to know I'm not the only one. While researching my new book, Gastronaut, a sort of manifesto for adventurous eating, I carried out a survey of 500 people and was relieved to learn that I'm not alone in my approach to food. I discovered, among other things, that 38 per cent of people don't like their pasta al dente, 43 per cent have never made a recipe from a television programme, three per cent would eat Nigella Lawson if they were cannibals, and 44 per cent have eaten their bogies. I also discovered that more people found that a take-away meal leads to sexual congress than an expensive meal at a restaurant.
But back to Jamie and his nutmeg. In the course of my gastronautical research, as well as discovering why asparagus makes your pee smell funny, why cheese makes you dream and how a hiccup works, I found out that nutmeg, when eaten in large quantities, can cause hallucinations. Erotic hallucinations. You need an awful lot of nutmeg to get really erotically airborne, but when you've got a warehouse full of the stuff, that's just dandy. It seems Jamie and his friends at our third-best-loved supermarket are a clever, naughty, fun-loving bunch of gastronauts after all.
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