Alison Bezzina

I was never a big fan of food. As a child, food was simply perfunctory. I never looked forward to mealtimes; I did not even look forward to desert or treat times.

I gave my mother an incredibly hard time, because her inbred belief that a chubby baby is a healthy baby did not match my aloof need to eat once every four days. Because she was worried sick about me, she experimented with every trick in the book to try to get me to enjoy my food. She tried feeding me whilst I sat on the kitchen sink with my little bare feet dangling under running water; she tried blackmailing me with my favourite TV shows; she even promised me a bicycle, a short hair cut, and a puppy, if only I ate all my greens; like a prison warden she even toyed with my outdoor privileges, and at one point she tried inviting guests and organising mini parties on a daily basis. After a while, she became so desperate to get some food inside me, that despite her better judgement, she would even allow me to eat a chocolate bar for lunch or dinner, but as life would have it, I hated chocolate and still do till this very day.

Like every mother of her generation, her dream was to put some flesh on me, but nothing seemed to work. So, for years, she resorted to hiding my thin legs under layers of tights and baggy trousers so that people would not stare at my scrawniness. It’s not that I did not want to eat, God knows I tried, if not for anything else not be compared to my well behaved cousin who always polished her plate at breakfast, lunch, dinner and anything that came in between. But, up until I hit puberty, (when staying thin suddenly became important), I simply was not interested in food. By this time my mother had given up on me and her daily kitchen menu consisted of two choices - Take It or Leave It!

Today, I am still not a fan of big portions but I love eating what I like. Still, I’d rather make reservations than make a meal and my idea of a balanced diet is holding a cookie in each hand. Though I would not go as far as saying that I suffer from a cooking phobia, I am definitely plagued with a condition that drives me away from the cooker and into the open arms of restaurants and anyone who will feed me. I don’t even butter my bread and if worst comes to worst, I settle for a micro-waved TV dinner. In short, if we are what we eat, then I’m fast, cheap and easy, because it is more likely for hell to freeze over than to get me to cook.

Let’s face it; even if you do not have children (who would slowly wither away if you do not cook at all), getting out of the mundane chore of food preparation is almost impossible. Whether you love it or hate it, hunger will strike, and sooner or later you have to make a sandwich, burn a toast, mix an instant soup, or chop an onion. There is absolutely no way of getting out of cooking in its entirety, and it’s probably because of this that I hate it so much. It’s a bit like those text books we had to read in school - no matter how interesting they were, we hated them because it was compulsory to read them!

A couple of years ago a friend convinced me to take a few cooking lessons. According to her I hated cooking so much because I had no clue about it. She did have a point since at the time, I thought that gravy is a beverage, and that with enough garlic you could even make a paper bag taste good. As willing as I was to learn, I knew that I did not have enough interest in the subject to follow a cooking course with serious commitment. What was most likely to happen was that I’d attend the first two lessons and then run like the clappers to the nearest restaurant. So, in order to make it impossible for me to give up before the course was over, I enrolled into a television competition whereby cooking idiots like me would be caught on tape competing against each other in a race to learn how to cook a decent meal. Perhaps you remember it - the show was called ‘Cibus’ and it aired about a year ago on NET TV. It was hosted by Clare and Pauline Agius who somehow managed to eat my cooking creations without gagging.

Believe it or not, I placed second in that competition, but after that, I never so much as touched another raw ingredient in my life. The lessons made me even more aware of the things I did not know about cooking, and more importantly they opened my eyes to the so many things that I preferred not to know about food -things like carbs, salts, fats, proteins, preservatives, sugar levels and sell-by dates. In hindsight I realise, that in my case against cooking, ignorance was truly bliss. The most interesting and engaging recipes had me rolling my eyes into the back of my forehead and wondering if there was any way to make up for the lost time I was spending in a kitchen. All I wanted to learn was how to rustle up an omelette without burning the house down, and perhaps how to make clear chicken soup when somebody was sick, but most of the recipes that the Chef considered easy to teach, called for the limbs of small animals indigenous only to exotic countries, herbs and spices that grew on the moon, and the patience of a dead turtle.

One day I decided to pull up my socks and take more interest in the recipes that we were being taught, so I went down to my local grocery store and asked for pine nuts. Had I asked for the nuts that Buddha sits on, I might have received a better reaction. Then I asked for chicory and cress and in not so many words I was told that they can only be found on glaciers near Iceland. I tried my luck with lemon thyme, and this landed me with an offer for a hot toddy ‘ghat-triq’.

So I’m sticking to my guns. I’m trusting my life in the hands of whoever cooks for me, not because I can’t cook, but simply because I don’t and won’t! There’s ample proof captured on many reels of tape that I can cook, but if I’m caught between a rock and a kitchen, I’m sure to find the strength to move the rock and slide out to the nearest restaurant.

First published in Life & Style Magazine March 2009