The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — A Chocolate Mallow in the Tesco Car Park with Gus

Read another chapter of Andrew Jamison's food writing. You can read the rest here.

Wordsworth and UPFs

‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ wrote Wordsworth. When he wrote these words I can’t imagine he ever thought they’d be recalled by someone wolfing down a Tesco own-brand chocolate mallow from the packet, with his son perched on the trolley at the end of a shopping trip, one early Friday afternoon in late November at a supermarket car park near the Marcham Road Interchange.

Indeed, I can’t imagine William Wordsworth having much time at all for ultra processed food like a chocolate mallow. The truth is that I don’t have much time for it either, in fact I make my own bread, and go out of my way to make meals from whole foods, but every now and again I do find myself succumbing to a sweet treat, and sometimes these are in the form of ultra processed food. And so it was that Friday in the car park. But at the end of a long week, for him and me, maybe there was nothing wrong with that.

Routines, Victor Meldrew and Tantrums

Every Friday I take Gus, my youngest child, shopping to Tesco — it’s nearby, reasonably cheap and its Clubcard points are worth twice their value at Pizza Express. And I can also get Clubcard points on fuel. But I’m under no illusions and can see that Mr Tesco has me eating out of the sweaty palm of his multinational, billionaire hand. Again, not very Wordsworthian, I know. 

I look after Gus on Monday and Fridays and for the rest of the week he’s in nursery so I can get on with work. We have our routines: on Monday I take him to the gymnastics centre at Berinsfield where we fall into the foam pit and bounce on the massive trampoline, and I hold his hand as he walks across the balance beam. On Fridays I take him to Tesco for the weekly shop which I try as hard as I can to keep under £100 (not easy, and we very rarely buy alcohol). Friends (and I do have a couple left despite all the parenting and work) are always telling me about the benefits of home delivery or click and collect, but I just have an unshakeable belief that going to the supermarket and doing the shopping myself is easier, quicker and there’s less chance of something going wrong and me having a Victor Meldrew I can’t believe it-style meltdown. I like to tell myself it’s entertaining for Gus, too: not my meltdowns, but to see the colours and aisles and produce, and now and again I let him use the Scan and Shop barcode gun, and feed him bits of baguette or give him a big apple just as his protestations and heckles start to rise. It’s hardly brilliant parenting, but it means I can get the shopping done while also looking after him, and that we don’t have to use our family time doing it at the weekend when my wife’s not working. And did I mention the Clubcard points?

Usually Gus is a very agreeable companion who shares my love of a supermarket: the people, the neatly stacked shelves, the jam doughnuts with a million ingredients covered in caster sugar, not to mention all the recipes yet to be brought to life. At its heart, I suppose, a supermarket is a place of possibility, even if it’s also a place of toddlers in trolley seats having tantrums about not getting that Hot Wheels Monster Truck.

Lists, Online Shopping and Banging a Tunnock’s Tea Cake on your Forehead

I always make a shopping list before we go, and it usually involves me checking cupboards for supplies of staples such as baked beans, cream of tomato soup, onions, garlic, carrots, flours, butter, eggs, milk - that kind of thing. For me, going to the supermarket is a pleasurable part of the cooking process that I don’t really want to shortcut through online ordering — also, how do I know they will pick the same bag of lemons that I would have picked, or select the same hake fillets that even though weighs exactly the same as the rest, just looks better? This is why I just can’t get behind online grocery shopping. 

But every now and again I do veer slightly from the list, and it just so happened last week that when were in the biscuit section (one of the highlights of the shopping trip, followed by the bakery section where the pink and white paper bags of raspberry jam doughnuts live), my eyes were caught by a blue packet and the words ‘Chocolate Mallows’.

Growing up, Tunnock’s Tea Cakes were a real treat to find in the cupboard, in that distinctive yellow packaging with the sketch of the healthy-looking, rosy cheeked boy (presumably drawn before he’d eaten the tea cakes), wrapped individually in the silver and red foil. We used to get them while they were still in the foil and slam them against our heads to break the chocolate, and because it had a slightly slapstick value. It doesn’t really work if you’re in a room on your own though, and I can’t see that catching on in Michelin starred restaurants to add to the authenticity (although it wouldn’t surprise me). Anyway, seeing these mallows on the shelf, I reached for a packet and let Gus decide whether we should buy them. He agreed. Suffice to say he didn’t need much persuasion. 

When we finish the shopping I always reward him with a little treat from the shopping, sometimes this is a nice piece of seasonal fruit, an apple or a few strawberries, sometimes it’s a pain au chocolat, sometimes it’s a small bag of crisps, but on this occasion it was a chocolate mallow. 

A Wordsworthian ‘Spot of Time’?

We got to the car, I opened the boot, and asked him, while he was still perched in the little child’s seat of the trolley, should we have a chocolate mallow? And there we were, me and Gus, Gus and I, by the opened car boot, with all of the shopping yet to unload, and the weather not quite raining, saying cheers over a chocolate mallow. A father and son, sharing a little, highly processed sweet treat bought on a whim, smiling, not caring if the ice cream was starting to melt and the peas were starting to thaw in their bags, but smiling, with the weekend ahead of us. 

To write about it now seems silly, or to hyperbolise it, and while it could hardly be described as one of the Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’, I sometimes think parenthood is built on these little moments, these little moments of ‘powerful feelings’ which can otherwise pass us by. So often these are sparked by food, and a moment of connection through food, even if it is just an own-brand chocolate mallow, scoffed down in a Tesco car park. 

And don’t judge me if I gave him a second one.

So What?

All of this is to say, that I know chocolate mallows aren’t good for me, I know UPFs aren’t good for me, and they’re certainly not good for my child, and I know, moreover, that Tesco isn’t good for any of us particularly independent butchers and bakers and greengrocers and the high street in general. But on balance, if I'm cooking decent food with good ingredients 90% of the time, if we’re tired and busy with to-do lists upon to-do lists, then a moment like this one, with a chocolate mallow shared between father and son in the car park, at the end of a long week, is probably doing neither of us any harm, and if anything, if might even be a moment he remembers, even if it’s not necessarily in a Wordsworthian way.