Tender

Look. This is a tough job. Every single day, I wake up. I sit at the damn keyboard and I’ve got to describe food.

It’s not easy.

Words are the raw materials and I’m in the same position as pornographers and writers of press releases... constantly on the point of running out of ammunition. I need as many as possible, and I am not a man who will easily let go of one of our limited armoury of adjectives.

OK. Anyone who types the word ‘flavorful’ (sic) should have their hands smashed with a mallet, but otherwise, no. We need every single purple descriptor we can lay our fingers on...

... except ‘Tender’.

I’m sitting... I admit, too late at night, watching re-runs of ‘Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives’ on cable and I know that is not a position from which to construct a reasoned argument. But... seriously? WTF is it with ‘Tenderness’

We need to work out how the hell we ever got to where a texture that favours the toothless became a measure of quality for good food.

At first, I thought it was perhaps the Tyranny of the Vox Pop. If, in their unhinged pursuit of relatability-at-all-costs, programme makers shove the mic up the nose of a civilian, we might expect banality. It’s possible that there’s some good ol’ boy at the counter, just waiting to opine that ‘Miss Ellie’s cole slaw sure do counterpoint the voluptuous richness of the breadin’ on her chicken fry steak an’ ah sure do ‘preciate’ her hot sauce. Why, it’s almos’ málà in it’s numbin’ intensity.” But more realistically they’re going to crash cut between three Sheldon Scale 7-1-1 Extreme Endomorphs, saying “Melts in the mouth”, “ Flavorful”, and “Mmmm. Tender”.

We have astonishing dentition. Highly evolved apex predators, we are also equipped as omnivores. Our incisors can rend flesh. We have canines that can grip while our powerful and adroit hands tear. Our molars can exert a crushing force of around 600 Newtons - more than enough to grind nuts and small bones. If our skulls were the same size as baboons or chimps... we’d have stronger jaws than them. Have a go. Have a little chew. You can bite harder than all but the most weapon of domestic dogs. Yet, a couple of weeks ago, someone I was eating with actually turned down sourdough in a restaurant because they ‘couldn’t be arsed to chew it’.

We accept it in small children. My own daughter used to prefer her dinner mashed up, at least until she got used to having teeth (to be fair, she also ate PlayDoh and thought peas went up her nose, but that’s not entirely germane to my logic flow here). We accept it in the old and sick.

I once pitched a story on Harvesters. I like roasts; I like institutional food. I thought it might be something I could amusingly reappropriate. The huge tranches of meat were, indeed excellent. The potatoes and heaps of veg were enormously competent and the gravy was plentiful... but what was terrifying was how thoroughly every diner in the place mashed their veg into their gravy.

It didn’t take us long to learn that we should slurp ramen loudly, that we should twizzle pasta round a fork, that it was OK to eat a taco with our hands. But I had to go to a Harvester to learn that an authentic step in the ritual of our National Meal, is to reduce the constituents to paste.

The problem with ‘tenderness’ is that once you realise, you can’t go back. I used to like an occasional Big Mac... but then I realised its most outstanding quality is the absence of resistance to the bite. Commercial fried chicken has a thousand things to recommend it until you ask yourself, ‘what the fuck did they do to this animal that the meat slips off the bone like an oily sweat sock?’ When was the last time a Pret sandwich took you any more effort to consume than your latté?

But this isn’t just about highly processed ‘fast’ food.

Once, there was a meal in a Manhattan Steakhouse. I had dreamed for decades of sitting at the white-clothed table, sinking a contemplative martini, then wrapping my face around a 16oz USDA Prime Porterhouse. The flavour was there, the smells, the seasoning... but it was so... so tender. The American Bovine, selectively bred over centuries, fattened with corn, its movement restricted, slaughtered while young. Certified ‘Prime’ so I could be assured that my purchase, according to the Dept. of Agriculture, would be “... tender, juicy, and flavorful”.

Look. I’ve got deadlines. If you’ve got any spare adjectives over there, sling them my way. My DMs are open. But can we fight back against tenderness?

If we don’t want to use our teeth, we probably deserve to lose them.