As an agnostic, who believes in the power of whiskey and a brisk walk in fresh air to elevate a bout of blues or deep life upset, I wander through the year adding to an ever-evolving list of rituals. Sometimes these combine with holidays of the religious sort but often exist solely to mark one month from the next. In unison these symbolic acts are my personal protection against the omnipresent- ‘what’s the point of it all?’
On January 1st in a bid to cleanse the bloated Christmas soul I eat Greek salad, although not to move too starkly away from the gluttony of the period it must be oily and served with chips to soak up the ample indulgence of new years eve. In late February when the Winter has drilled itself into my bones causing me to hunch and cough like a workhouse urchin, the first signs of Magnolia buds call for a rallying of the troops and a three course dinner curated around the colour pink. A nod to the exquisite shell tones of the virgin petals. When the self-hate that orbits my consciousness at arms length creeps too close, I go running. On my birthday I swim. On Sundays I drink Guinness.
The period between September and the end of the year is rich in such markers, watching my mum make quince jelly, an annual evening pouring over 9/11 theories and notes on Iraq, dinner in honour of the corn crop, bonfire night and of course Halloween. My routine for the day of the dead should involve a party and all of the associated festivities, but this is not my favourite part; that’s reserved for the preamble.
I like the phone calls in the week leading up: what are we wearing? What’s our hair doing? Heels or no heels? What arrangements of intoxicants will be on offer? I like the hot shower I take with a cold beer before I spend the hour on my face. The precision of a deep moisturiser, layers of foundation and concealer. The eyeshadow pressed into the lids accentuated by a dark swish of mascara and pound shop lashes. But the most sacred of acts for the night ahead is the fish finger sandwich. All components should be available from the corner shop where, approximately two drinks in, I run semi clad in party outfit with a crumpled tenner. Pitta bread is my preferred vehicle, a whole jar of tartar sauce, Birdseye fish fingers, little gem if it’s available, iceberg as a crunchy understudy, jarred capers if not. A lemon and vinegar can normally be sourced from the fridge, but if not they too are added to the shop counter. When home the fish fingers are shoved in the oven whilst I attempt to put tights on without laddering them and l paint my lips.
In her autobiography Tracey Emin gives the reader a piece of advice, always line your stomach before a big night. She too favours the fish finger sandwich but she cooks hers soft and mushes them into the bread, I prefer mine crispy and drenched in Sarsons. The finished result should be chased with something short and strong, it should be shared with any early guests and it should be savoured. It will stand you in good stead for the night of dancing ahead.
As there will be no Halloween parties this year, we’ve gone curve ball on our Halloween issue, Emily has conjured up some thoughts on meat below. Blood and guts and the horror of shit meat- a pox on your house Billy bear ham.
Happy Halloween,
Rebecca and the witches of Marigold.
Suggested Pairing
To those of you who may not immediately link the following pairing to our loose Halloween theme this week, I would say that everyday feels like Halloween with this current government. Led by Boris in a scarier role than Chucky or that clown out of ‘It’.
The latest in the utter disgrace of it all was Wednesday, when Conservative MPs rejected Labour's Opposition Day motion to extend the provision of free school meals by 322 votes to 261, with only five Tory MPs rebelling.
Before Covid-19, 4 million children lived in poverty in the UK. That’s 9 children to every class of 30. That number is increasing.
There are a growing number of councils across the UK who have already committed to going against the vote and extending the scheme themselves. Restaurants and cafes have also jumped up to support in their hundreds, offering free lunches to those in need. It shouldn’t take individuals but somehow that’s where we are right now.
Sign Marcus Rashford’s petition (please note, this might be only time I support a Man U player publicly), write to your local MP if they haven’t already committed to extending the scheme, make so much fucking noise this will be impossible to ignore. #EndChildFoodPoverty
Meat Paper
Words & Images: Emily Boyfield
Meat Paper was originally a Google Doc I made during lockdown because I love a pointless goodoc, sue me. On it, I wrote every thought that came to me while standing at the butchers counter, along with a list of my purchases. It turned into a bi-weekly ritual, which I would update and share with the Marigolds. Bex especially found the mundanity of the scribblings amusing and suggested I flesh out the writing, and here we are.
Meat often holds gory connotations, and blood can cause visceral reactions, hence it was a no brainer to talk about meat for our halloween issue. If in doubt, freak em out. Meat can be taboo in our society for many reasons, but to me it all really boils down to the fact that we literally are meat. In the West many of us are squeamish about eating/prepping meat and this is reflected in popular culture, which associates meat with gore and transgression; cannibalistic tropes in horror films are rife, and I won’t even go into metal band names. Individualist society, with it’s Cartesian logic, aims to separate ourselves from the fact that we are in fact physically very similar, and symbiotically connected to everything around us, including the animals we eat. Accepting that we are meat sacks is terrifying, as we too, like all other forms of meat sacks great or small, will one day die. Possibly in a horror movie style death involving cannibalism, but probably just from disease or old age.
For me however, what’s more scary than being a meat sack is the current state of our food system. I will happily crunch down on chicken feet and tripe with reckless abandon, but a feeling of helplessness and fear overtakes me when I see highly processed ‘fake meat’ on a supermarket shelf. Fake meat often has an ingredient list as long as your arm, and I stand by my aversion to this. When you see a list that long you have to think “why does there need to be that many ingredients, where do they all come from?” and more importantly “who is profiting from this?” Cramming a product with stuff that is far removed from raw ingredients can only benefit industrial food company shareholders. These food behemoths can produce this stuff cheaper, as most of the ingredients are low quality, pricing out small more ethically sound producers. In the process they brand themselves as forward thinking, claiming that ‘fake meat’ is the answer to climate crisis and bad health, while at the same time implicating that real meat is very very bad. It's the same old terrifying story.
As we all know, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, moralistic tropes around food are boring AF and do little for people other than make them more miserable. As Matt Bruenig says “anywhere you find poor people, you also find non-poor people theorizing their cultural inferiority and dysfunction”, so I won’t bang on about individual choice. I’m also aware that it’s all too easy to fall into ‘Jamie Oliver vs the Turkey Twizzler’ rhetoric. Our society loves to theorise around why poor people have bad diets, usually to the conclusion that if you aren’t/are eating ‘x, y, z’ then you are a bad person. Dietary finger pointing is very obviously based in classism and racism, with indigenous communities who practise non western traditions of eating meat usually the most admonished, and tends to judge the individual when in fact our poor diets are a systemic issue. We all know ‘bad meat’ (intensively farmed/pumped with hormones) is bad for us, and the environment. However many of us do not have access to good quality meat because of our income, location or physical capabilities; all products of the society we live in.
On a personal level the meat counter is something that is close to my heart. Butchery offered me a lifeline of sorts. After cheffing at some terrible restaurants (i.e. crying in the walk in fridge most days because of the off-the-charts chef bro toxicity), I decided to take up a friend's offer and apply to the butchers he was working at. I spent two years working at the butchers and it was a special, educational, humbling, tough, conflicting but thoroughly fun time. Whilst I am not a particularly squeamish, there were for sure times when even I felt a little queasy, purely for the viscerally of the job. There is no hiding from blood when you're on the block wearing a white coat; it sticks to your skin, clothes and memory. It helped me to solidify my ideas surrounding meat; and I am beyond privileged to have had such an experience.
I would like butchery skills to be available to everyone, and sadly we have lost so much ancestral knowledge that was previously passed from generation to generation. Nowadays access to this knowledge is often inaccessible for those without time or money; for example, a Ginger Pig master butchery class will set you back a cool £165, no thanks. A thought that came to me at the counter, that might go a small way to re-educating/ ‘de-horrifying’ meat for people, would be something along the lines of a community meat freezer, much like the idea of a community fridge. I have found a few leads for places that are doing something similar with meat (such as this Inuit led project in Canada), but essentially the idea would be as follows: A relationship would be formed between a small, local, sustainable, good quality farmer and a volunteer butcher. Whole animals would then be broken down with the community members who sign up to the scheme, which would be subsidised to allow for greater accessibility. Much like barn raising once acted as a form of community building, the act of butchering an animal, teaching people basic butchery skills and sharing the resulting cuts of meat equally between members, as well as sharing recipes/techniques for the more obscure cuts, would be something I would love to see. I hope that one day I can help to set up an initiative such as this, hopefully within our Marigold project. I seem to have veered off the horror theme, and ended up on more of a positive note; much like when finishing a horror film can lead to a sense of catharsis, perhaps Meat Paper too can lead to something transformative.
Thanks for tuning in sweet friends. Hope you have a Halloween marked by your very own food ritual, whatever that be a veggie lasagne or roast suckling pig; we welcome you all. As always send us your thoughts, pictures, musings or just a hello to our email or follow us on Instagram.
Our links this week are in collaboration with my sister Holly, who frequently acts as my own personal film critic, we share with you her picks for some twisted Halloween watching. - Josie
‘Silence of The Lambs’ - “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti”; if that isn’t on brand for this issue and us Marigolds, I quit.
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover - the one film on this list recommended by Holly that I haven’t seen. She described it as Michael Gambon weirdness. I read costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier and Helen Mirren, an all round winner surely?
Whatever Happened To Baby Jane - there’s surely something Freudian about my sister recommending this film. A truly dark and twisted film and suitable for those of us who can’t take the gore of your classic slasher film seriously. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are both insane and incredible and apparently hated each other both before, during and after filming which adds an extra level to this scene of rats for dinner and cackling.
Delicatessen - somewhat less psychological damaging than the other three, this black French comedy puts cannibalism at the centre of our Post-Apocalyptic futures. Worth it also for the pure anarchy of the last half hour where the aim seems to be to destroy the entirety of the film set.