The Food Situation

I need to warn you about something before the diary starts.

There is a lot of food in it. Photos of food. Descriptions of food. Opinions about food. Entire paragraphs dedicated to what arrived in takeaway packaging inside a brown paper bag, left outside my door by someone I never ever saw.

I am not a food writer. I have no particular expertise in cuisine. I cannot tell you the difference between a jus and a reduction, and I have no intention of learning.

But when you are confined to a single room with no control over anything, the meals become everything. They are the event. They are the structure. They are the one moment in the day when something actually happens.

You hear the knock. You wait a few seconds. You open it. You look down. And there it is. A brown paper bag. Sometimes warm. Sometimes not. Always a surprise, though not always the kind of surprise you want.

Each delivery brought a small wave of anticipation followed by an honest assessment. Is this identifiable? Is there cutlery? Has something leaked into something else? And, critically, is there a little dessert treat?

I started photographing every meal. Not for social media. Not to complain. Just because it gave me something to do, and because describing what I was eating became a creative challenge. How many different ways can you write about rice? More than you would think, as it turns out.

Some meals were genuinely fine. Some were baffling. One or two were so confusing that I still could not tell you what they were meant to be, even with photographic evidence.

Here is a preview.

That is what passed for dinner on one of the evenings. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions.

The diary is full of these. Nearly every breakfast, lunch, dinner, photographed and described with whatever energy I had left at the end of each day.

The diary starts in two weeks. Subscribe so you do not miss Day 0.

Andy Candler