The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — PREFACE

Read the preface to Andrew's series of food writing, The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food, below.

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Is it right to write about food in 2025?

Has there ever been a worse time than now to write about food? In August a famine was declared in Gaza; food prices are rocketing in the UK due to very stubborn inflation meaning families have to make choices between heating and eating; there has never been as much obesity, and yet there has never been as much malnutrition; there has never been as much choice of food – strawberries all year round – yet the farmers who produce them have never been so poor, and the land they farm never more vulnerable to extreme changes in weather. And that’s not to mention that a third of all food produced is wasted, or how war has tested, to breaking point, supply chains globally. What a world. 

Fiddling while Rome burns?

So, some might say – and I can see their perspective – that writing a book about my life in food, exploring in bite-sized chapters the people and places behind my most memorable meals, might be ignorant and tone deaf to these problems, that it’s akin to fiddling while Rome burns, or, worse, insulting those who live in starvation. 

I get it. 

But, to those people I’d say it’s quite the contrary; I believe that due to these issues there has never been a better, more urgent time to write about food, as it occupies such a defining part of our lives, in unprecedented ways, as we enter the second quarter of the century. Those who took it for granted are now having to stop and think about it, and it’s becoming a topic of conversation, but not necessarily for the right reasons: ‘I can’t believe how much my food shop was this week – ridiculous!’ 

Never before has it been so hard to feed ourselves, and feed each other. Never before has our relationship with it been so precarious, and for that reason, so precious. Never before, I’d argue, has the imperative to write about food been as strong as it is now. 

Food for its own sake?

If there is one thing this book is not about, though, it’s decadence. Generosity and abundance, perhaps, but never food for the sake of food, or food as style, or food as Instagram reel, or food as oil painting. For me, form is function, and the style or form of a dish has got to be bound up with its function, and what is the function of food but to restore and sustain us, physically as well as on a deeper level? 

Food is fuel, yes, but the forms that fuel can take fascinates me endlessly, and the context in which we refuel ourselves communally or not is also important to consider. So, while I appreciate food as fuel I want to look beyond that as its basic function, even if that is its most important function. 

Growing up

I write this book as someone who grew up in a humble, working-class house in rural Northern Ireland, outside a small village called Crossgar, on the outskirts of the outskirts, with both parents working, and providing for five children. I write this book as someone who did not go abroad until I was in my teens, and that was a school trip to the war graves in Northern France — and I can still remember the taste of the French butter in the ham baguettes we got for our packed lunch from the hostel. But I don’t think you have to travel far to take delight and interest in food, and to savour it as much as those who are presented with the equivalent of a banquet on a daily basis. 

Why write The Hungry Poet?

I write this book as someone who loves to eat, but also loves to cook, and therefore save money. I write this book as someone approaching midlife and suddenly realising how important food has been to me, the joy it has brought not just me, but those around me, the stories we can tell through it, and how important it is yet in bringing people together at a time when our tendency to isolation and loneliness has been made so easy, not least by technology. 

I write this book as someone who loves nothing more than having a house full of people sharing not fiddly little bits and pieces but real, proper, humble food, made with love and care and attention and discipline. 

I write this book, not as a chef in a Michelin starred kitchen with froths and foams and pipettes – as interesting as that may be –, but as someone who has eaten enough to understand the subtleties and touches required to elevate a simple dish to something more than that, and is continuing to learn and tweak and refine their own methods. 

I write this book about food as a father, a brother, a son and a husband whose life has been enriched by food, either food cooked for me, or cooked by me and shared at that place, which in our secular world perhaps holds as much sanctity as anywhere, the table. Indeed, is there another place which promotes inclusion, democracy and equality as much as the dining table?

But, to circle back, this book is not about luxury, but rather the extraordinary to be found in the ordinary, simple pleasures I’ve found in the commonplace dishes and foods I’ve cooked and eaten throughout my life, in the various places I’ve ended up. These places could be home or away, supermarket car park or back street Dublin pub, or a flat in Bristol, and I hope you’ll recognise some of them and join me in my reveries. 

Food and memory

And ‘reveries’ is an important word here, as so much of writing this book has been about memory and how a certain food such as vine ripened tomatoes take me back to my Grandfather’s greenhouse, or lamb curry makes me think of doing my teacher training at a challenging school with two mates in West Yorkshire, for example. Food, when it’s at its best, is not about pomposity or showmanship, but about humility and actually blends into the background, as what is most important is the occasion for eating as much as the food itself. 

The poetry of food

And as for poetry, as the title suggests, looking back at my life in food and publishing poems, I’ve wanted to seek out the poetry of food, and what that might mean. The beauty of a new ingredient, the colours of a dish, the atmosphere, the context, the people who made it or whom I have made it for. But, one of the major parallels between food and poetry for me is balance. A poem – at least, the best kind of poem – walks a tightrope between one thing and another; for example, pathos and logos, or sentiment and ideas, or restrictions of formal constraints and freedom of expression, or imagination and reality. In much the same way, I’ve found that the best kinds of food also adhere to this cosmic rule of balance – not necessarily symmetry, indeed asymmetry has its place – of flavours: sweet and sour for example, or hot and cold, brittle and soft. So, it seems to me that bound up in beauty is the idea of balance. Maintaining that in a poem is the most difficult of tasks for the poet, and so many poems overdo it in one way or another, just as in our cooking we can over season or undercook. But, when the poet or cook gets it right, the poem or the plate of food lives on in the memory. 

Hunger and feeling hungry

Some may take issue with the title of this book, and particularly the adjective ‘hungry’. Do any of us really know what hunger is? Indeed, when my own children mention they’re ‘starving’ or ‘hungry’ they get short shrift, just as I did as a child. But as we know, hunger has many meanings beyond the physical sensation of needing food. I suppose bound up in the unwritten job description of ‘poet’, that most sought after yet badly remunerated of roles, is a sense of restlessness, and feeling of never quite being satisfied with one’s artistic endeavours. There is a feeling of constantly falling short, of the job never quite being done, of the finished object never quite achieved. However, eventually the poet comes round to the realisation that the pursuit is the point, the finished work is elusive, and it’s the ‘stepping stone’ as Seamus Heaney referred to it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which we should focus on, as opposed to ‘the destination’. 

And so, what you’ll find in the following pages, as well as those who have been so magnanimous to sit beside me, are the foods and dishes that have sustained me and restored me along that never-ending road to a place called poetry.