Chocolate Gifts South Africa

'FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD'? BARMECIDE BANQUETS and THE SCREEN

After she and Helen Burns have been treated to a “cup of tea”, a “thin morsel of toast”, and slices of “a good-sized seed-cake” by the gracious, compassionate Miss Temple (a character unaccountably omitted from Cary Fukunaga’s latest film-version), Jane Eyre rejoices that she will not have to “prepare in imagination the Barmecide supper of hot roast potatoes or white bread and new milk, with which I was wont to amuse my inward cravings”. How easily are Lowood waifs’ “inward cravings” satisfied! Unstarving multitudes of the viewing public of our century sit down to wallow imaginatively in an endless array of Barmecide banquets, courtesy of the small screen. We do not even have to do our own imagining….

When I was a little lad in the 1960s, local advertisements for food and drink seemed very low-key indeed. I remember South African stage-star, Heather Lloyd-Jones, all auburn curls and lipsticked pout, purring like Joan Greenwood over some “wonderful” brand of tinned tomatoes. What a friend of mine later and wittily dubbed “hard-core food” certainly did not dominate South Africa’s cinema screens (there was, of course, no television for South Africans in those ostensibly deprived times), and, when feasts did feature in magazine or movie ads, they tended to be Norman Rockwellian (oh the glisten of a roast turkey or even of a humbler chicken!), not – to coin an adjective – Hugh Hefneresque. When did it all change? The ’seventies? The ’eighties, when not only Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko in the original “Wall Street” slaveringly endorsed greed of all varieties? Whenever the change occurred, there was certainly a shift, and food advertising became much more sumptuous, sensual, and outright lubricious, when I was a youngish adult. How many torrents of chocolate the screen has poured over me! How many phallic icecreams have I seen sighing lovelies consume with embarrassing relish! How much meat, flushing at its own rawness, or brazenly crisp and browned, have I seen sizzling on glowing barbecues! Really, it has all become a little too much of a possibly good thing: much too much gastronomic info., in fact.

Gift For Change » Blog Archive » Mother's Day Gift List

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