When it comes to matters of food, many of us like to think of ourselves as gourmets. But in reality we simply like eating – frequently far too much – which makes us more like gourmands than gourmets, so losing that trendy epicurean presence of a Michelin Inspector that so many of us hunger to entertain.

In my quest for a sustainable, more economical, less self-absorbed and tastier culinary lifestyle I’ve been described as a latter-day Philistine by some of my friends (me being the man who once boasted that he could debone a duck by making only two incisions). Mainly because I’ve grudgingly come to realise the puffery and pretension associated with fine dining.

Moreover, I’ve shocked foodies who take themselves rather too seriously by panning the dogma of pairing drink and food. It’s not that I maintain that pasta doesn’t go well with wine – of course it does. The Italians gulp down litres of it while guzzling up their carbs. Does a Shiraz/Merlot blend go well with a nicely grilled steak? That’s almost a no-brainer, but then so do about 100 other assorted beverages and not all of them are wine. And for many, what’s boerewors at a braai without a beer in your right hand?

I once attended a food and wine pairing near Stellenbosch where the presenter, a cherubic-looking individual with a fluty voice, told us that this outrageously expensive Sauvignon Blanc “can only be enjoyed with lightly oak-smoked chicken along with artichoke hearts and fresh asparagus – trust me people – I know”.

Most of the audience appeared to be awed by these pearls of wisdom. Listening like Eastern Cape farmers being told by Angus Buchan that it’s going to rain soon, assiduously they recorded this vital information in small notebooks. Now I have to confess that it was a very nice wine, but I couldn’t see my budget extending to accept its more than R600-a-bottle price tag for the pleasure of uncorking that bottle (even if I hid it under my bed and drank it all on my own when everyone was asleep). I’m a great fan of smoked chicken salad, especially on a hot day. Artichokes are good, as is fresh asparagus, but how did this food-and-wine prophet acquire the mandate to issue these instructions? Furthermore, where does all this codswallop come from and why has it managed to achieve such traction?

My theory is that much of the blame can be laid at the doors of the advertising agencies of wine producers, who themselves have encouraged such tomfoolery to boost their sales. The agency copywriters are given the brief: “Pair Wine with Food”. These individuals, usually employed on the strength of their flaky ideas (sometimes confused with being able to “think out of the box”), are then locked up in The Silly Room with samples of the wine, a pile of Condé Nast-recommended cookbook recipes, lots of cocaine along with ample backup supplies of mescaline and maybe a magic mushroom or two, then instructed to get on with it.

The crazed copywriters are only released when all the wine has been paired with suitably exotic food items – the sort of food that ordinary people don’t usually eat and can’t obtain or afford anyway. The outcome of this creative exercise manifests itself in those little messages on tags attached to wine bottle necks or inscribed on labels: “The soft blueberry notes of this Cinsaut lend themselves to a marriage with quenelles of wild boar with Portobello-stuffed tortellini “or “The mysterious rooibos aftertaste that lingers after sipping this exquisite Pinot Gris makes it a perfect companion for jugged hare served with a maceration of truffle-infused parsnips”.

So, assuming Mrs Van Tonder has purchased any of this wine and decides to follow the handy pairing recommendations, she’s now faced with the dilemma of finding wild boar to be transformed into quenelles, or jugged hare, and if her purse is really bulging… a couple of truffles for the parsnips.

Like my foodie friends who want to unfriend me for displaying my Philistinian tendencies, you may be accusing me of being overly flippant. But I speak from experience.

A little old lady in an off-sales once asked me for help.

“Excuse me, are you good with wine?” she asked me.

“I can only try,” I replied.

“Well, my son likes wine and he’s coming over tonight. So I want to give him a good dinner – but this label says that this wine goes with these things which I don’t really understand.” She handed me a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. The label read: “This is a steely but sufficiently round wine with zesty lime undertones that simply begs to be paired with poached halibut and saffron couscous.”

I took the bottle from her gently and returned it to its rack, saying that I was sure that her son was a reasonable man who might really enjoy a nicely grilled rump immediately available from the supermarket next door with a bottle of Tassies. I mean, where she was going to find a halibut on that afternoon? And as for saffron for the couscous…

Agency copywriters (and here I must make a full disclosure to admit that at one time I was one myself) give the foodies and wannabe sommeliers who buy into this claptrap the opportunity to place themselves a notch or two above humanity’s heaving masses, because where the little old lady in the bottle store clearly did not “understand” the nuances of wine and fine food, they do.

By now some of you are probably saying that this fellow actually is a Philistine. Maybe even an Orc. Here he is writing for a food publication while he obviously doesn’t care a hoot about fine wine and food – which is what food publications are all about, aren’t they? You may well be correct, but for the record, I care quite a lot about anything that’s prepared with care, enthusiasm, love and passion. What set me off in this direction is that these pairings frequently include “… goes well with goat cheese”.

Well, I make cheese from goat milk nearly every day, and I always wonder what copywriters mean when they carelessly throw “goat’s cheese” into the mix.

They don’t say “recommended with cow cheese” – although they may well write “superb with well-matured Cheddar” or “stupendous with Stilton”. Which to me means that the mescaline has probably got the better of them because they don’t really know what they are talking about. There are any number of cheeses made with goat milk: French Chevré (which may be what most of them sort of had in mind); Banon, made since ancient times and sold wrapped in chestnut leaves; Feta, which everyone’s familiar with but is often also made with sheep milk; Majorero, Spain’s goat milk equivalent of its popular sheep-milk Manchego – the list is long and goes on. Joining the ranks more recently was a South African Bokmakiri soft goat cheese.

This sloppiness leads me to think that the originators of these pairings have quite possibly never even seen the food items that they dream up so creatively, let alone tasted jugged hare, foam of horseradish, deconstructed flounder or jellied eels. They would probably never order goat cheese in a restaurant because they might fear that it would taste of goat. If truth be told, a cheeseburger made with a slice of factory-processed cheese would probably be the first choice.

So what is good food? I think that depends on a whole heap of things. At the outset I take cognisance of the fact that food is a primary mover in the continuing progression or extinction of all living things on this planet. Charles Darwin told us that nature is ruthless and for a species to survive it must adapt or slip away. This means that, along with being able to reproduce and take shelter from the elements, the ability to secure food and drink on an ongoing basis is a vital requirement; from mosquitoes to humans. American psychologist Abraham Maslow placed these fundamental requirements at the base layer of his well-worn Hierarchy of Needs model that postulates human behaviour.

Once his belly is full, Homo sapiens moves up the hierarchy ladder to progressively higher levels ensuring on the way that he is safe, loved, belongs somewhere, is esteemed (in that order), and at the top of the hierarchy arrives to experiment with the state of self-actualisation. This is where we return to food because self-actualisation could go a number of different ways. Most people like to express themselves, and many do so by cooking, for their friends and family while a relative minority do it professionally. When done with skill, love, care, economy, imagination and a considerable dollop of enthusiasm, cooking can be as expressive as portrait painting or writing sonatas.

But add a large measure of hubris along with a generous scoop of narcissism and we find among others: a gaggle of Yuppiechef groupies, Dinner Party Nazis who have committed their souls to The Culinary Way and individuals who argue that Marco Pierre White’s reputation as former enfant terrible of the UK restaurant scene is cool “because he’s a truly great chef and a really creative guy”.

In short, we have grist to that mill which has now become the Realm of Food Snobs and Pretentious Cooks. There was I thinking that we humans were past all that nonsense when history overtook those Romans who forced themselves to upchuck at banquets to demonstrate how wealthy or important they were.

When the issue of eating, cooking and food starts to divide instead of drawing people closer, we have the beginnings of a problem.

The late Anthony Bourdain, a man who I admired hugely, not only for his ability to entertain when it came to matters culinary but also for his honesty and compassion, wrote in his Les Halles Cookbook that good cooks (read people who make good food) need a number of attributes. Will, desire and determination to cook good food are some of them. As are persistence and courage; like Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount he wrote “do not be afraid”. But on a more abstract level Bourdain insisted that a good cook needs a pure heart and soul, “meaning that you are cooking for the right reasons”. But above all, a good cook must embody love. Love for the people you are cooking food for – even if you might not know or see those people. This emotion has wide-ranging meaning, because it also includes love for the ingredients being used. Respect food, he pleaded, and take nothing for granted.

In my book, ingredients that lead to good food are local ingredients as they become available according to season. A caring cook will not seek strawberries flown in from Spain simply because the South African strawberry season is shut. Neither will a good cook feature fish from Norway or grilled Seventy Four on the menu when a number of Sassi-sustainable options are available. The finest rump, acorn-fed piglets and the tenderest asparagus, or any other high-end ingredients for that matter, do not necessarily ensure Culinary Nirvana. Bourdain used the French as an example, perhaps because Gallic blood ran in his veins, pointing out that “the French know what to do with the tough, bony, squiggly, and fatty stuff” because they’ve been doing it for a long time. Good food originates from poor people who’ve always had limited options – this has been the case in just about every major cuisine – not only in French but also the Spanish, Portuguese, Indian, Portuguese, Chinese, Italian and Eastern Mediterranean culinary traditions. What I mean is: follow the peasant way of doing things, because they knew best and you won’t go wrong.

There are two final elements in this quest to distinguish Good Food from Snob Food (because Snob Food can actually taste good sometimes) and they are Sharing and Place.

Very often these two merge into the same thing. Ask me what was the finest meal that I’ve ever had and I might reflect for only a few seconds before replying that it was crab salad in a funny little roadside eatery in Antsiranana (formerly Diego Suarez) in northern Madagascar 23 years ago. It was sublimely simple: the glistening crab flesh abundant, succulent and seawater fresh in a salad of cress-like leaves and thinly-sliced red onions served with little bowls of aioli and a crisp Malagasy coarse-flour baguette. The only drink available was Madagascar’s Three Horses beer which arrived in litre bottles and was quaffed enthusiastically, although some at the table laughed and claimed that formalin had been added so that it could be distributed into the giant island’s furthest reaches to arrive in a drinkable condition.

So why was it such a good meal? The food was undeniably superb, but there was more to it. I was part of a documentary film crew that had split up to various locations on the island for a month and we were having a get-together lunch – a sort of wrap celebration, before flying back to Cape Town. Days before leaving for the shoot I’d married Heidi and she’d flown over half way through it to help me. We’d spent two weeks working in the rainforest alone, which in hindsight was something of a blissful honeymoon.

Now we were in Antsiranana sitting in the bright sunlight among impossibly vivid bougainvillea in large native pots, viewing the sparkling Indian Ocean; everyone had stories to tell and we were going home for Christmas. There was the petite cook with a disproportionately white smile, beautiful as only Malagasy women can be, looking across her open-plan kitchen; observing these rowdy South Africans enjoying her local creation. And not one of us cared a fig if there was formalin in the beer – indeed, we ordered more rounds.

Childhood memories often conspire to be the insidious criteria of all that’s good. I recall my grandmother (these days referred to as my culinary muse) packing for roadside picnics in what used to be the Transkei when travelling between Grahamstown and Durban. The carefully crisped chicken roasted in her old rotisserie; thick slices of her famous cold meat loaf which began life as a medley of meats turned though a hand mincer, bound by an egg or two and judiciously spiced before being covered with baking paper secured with string and steamed in a glass bowl for an hour; slices of buttered wholewheat bread, potato salad made with homemade mayonnaise (Hellman’s was out of the question) and flecked with chives; pickled onions and a wedge of Roquefort cheese. Now in my later years all of these food items elicit favourable responses when sparking through my cerebrum, but most of all I remember the old lady’s love and her attention to detail.

Eating and sharing is a way of celebrating life and occasionally death.

About 15 years ago Heidi, our then five-year-old daughter and I travelled deep into one of the most inaccessible parts of KwaZulu-Natal to pay respects to a man who had worked for my family since the early ’40s. The nearest place on a map would inform me that we were not far from an outpost called Umtulwa. The Umvoti River ran several hundred metres below.

A girl sangoma had come of age on that day and we’d inadvertently arrived in the middle of the celebration. Goats had been slaughtered and after we’d visited Jim Nene’s grave, his widow shyly requested that we stay for lunch. As honoured guests, just the three of us sat on low benches in the ancestors’ hut. We waited a short while, slightly uneasy, not knowing what to expect. Then Jim’s wife arrived accompanied by several teenage girls.

They were carrying an enormous wooden meat platter piled generously with sliced braaied goat. Zulu steam bread along with a small heap each of fresh-chopped green chilli and coarse salt accompanied the meat. Jim’s wife had a two-litre bottle of iced Coke and an unopened packet of Baker’s Lemon Creams. They moved a bench from the other side of the hut to before us as a makeshift table for the food. Then they exited through the low door, shuffling backwards respectfully. It had been a long journey and we were famished, so we tucked in.

The meat was perfectly braaied; crispy on the outside but otherwise tender and flavoursome from the aromatic wood smoke of an open fire. Steam bread is made typically in those parts by putting yeasted dough inside an oiled Checkers bag, knotting it, placing it in a big pot of boiling water then keeping the lid closed until the steam has cooked the bread through. With the chillies and salt the soft warm bread was a fine companion to the fragrant meat. We ate until we were sated, and there was still sufficient to fill the doggie bag that we were urged to take home.

Even today I still reflect on that odd but emotionally profound meal in the Nene ancestor hut. It was a spontaneous gesture from very poor people, offered with no conditions and huge respect to unexpected guests. Goats are not slaughtered lightly in the Umvoti Valley. Even cold Coca-Cola and Lemon Creams are exceptionally sought-after commodities in those parts. In a strange way it brought some closure to a man who had featured large in much of my formative life. It was a humble but utterly delicious meal that embraced many of the aspects of what today I would regard as good food.

After all, some of history’s great spiritual teachers have maintained that sharing food at its deepest level is an affirmation of our existence and hospitality laced with sincerity with no hint of brinkmanship is one of the things that make us human. DM