Tales From The Madhouse

Deep-fried lettuce, anyone? 

Yesterday, I saw a video on Facebook with the eye-catching title: ‘Omelette Pockets: perfect for surprising your guests’. 

The idea was that you dipped a spatula into the whisked-up eggs, then into boiling oil. Once cooked, the egg mixture could be slipped off the spatula, producing rectangular omelettes with a pitta-like opening at one end so you could fill them with cheese and peppers.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I have friends round for dinner, I don’t generally serve them omelettes, and, if I did, they wouldn’t be deep-fried omelettes, and they wouldn’t be the shape of the pockets on the back of my jeans – they’d look like conventional omelettes, because I’m old-fashioned that way. So, yes, if I served my guests ‘omelette pockets’, it would definitely be a surprise for them, though not one I think they’d appreciate.

My husband pointed out that these videos were aimed at ‘young people’, not boring old farts like us. I’m not wholly convinced of this, as everyone I know who watches this sort of thing is in their fifties, though it’s certainly true that I know quite a few people in their teens and their twenties who seem to prefer food presented in a novel manner. We have also noticed the influence of these videos on the menus of cafes we frequent – there seem to be far more burgers, hot dogs and flatbreads around, usually garnished with deep-fried gherkins or fennel coleslaw. You know you’re getting old when all you want is a cheese and pickle sandwich, but the closest the café comes to this is a Padana pizza covered in tiny spheres of gelatinized basil oil. And have you noticed how every dessert has to come with its own little tent made out of caramel filigree - I think they must have passed a law about this when I wasn't looking.

Anyway, I‘ve spent more time than is healthy watching You Tube videos this summer. To be fair to myself, it's mostly been Walter Santi cat videos (and I defy anyone to deny the psychological benefits of  watching the adventures of D’Artagnon, Princess and the rest of the gang) and Silver Sneakers Exercises For Seniors videos (I sometimes even do them!). However, I have also been watching LOTS of other stuff. The internet has this effect, doesn’t it? – it sucks you into its arcane world of crafting, after-the-pub-recipe ideas, celebrity gossip, lists of the twenty best one-liners from Frazier or the ten best dance moves from the 1940s, films of people being genuinely stupid or else setting things up to look like they’re being genuinely stupid, and accounts of kittens being rescued from down wells and neglected dogs having their matted, overgrown fur shaved off, accompanied by generic poignant music.

Once you start watching, you can’t stop. These videos are usually short but the next one usually follows automatically without your intervention. Quite soon, you find yourself growing bored, thinking ‘I’m wasting time here’, but somehow you just can’t drag yourself away…

And, sooner than you might imagine, a five second advert break feels like a major intrusion on your viewing pleasure, and you start to wonder how you ever tolerated the advert breaks on ITV.

So, I’m thinking to myself, what do all these videos tell us about the modern world? What would aliens think of us if the only evidence they had was You Tube? What kind of world do kids think they’re growing up in, when most of their information comes from the internet?

Well, I can see why Type 2 diabetes is on the rise, for one thing. I’ve yet to see a ‘fabulous food idea’ on YouTube that doesn’t involve the essential food groups: sugar, saturated fat, and condensed milk. You’d think YouTube was in partnership with Nestle, the number of times condensed milk makes an appearance. In my youth, it was an old-fashioned canned product used by old men in their tea, but now it's had a You Tube renaissance and people seem to be making everything out of it. They’ll be weaving it into bullet-proof vests next.

After you’ve watched a few of these videos, you start to think that the bacon and brie sandwich you ate for lunch was essentially health food.

YouTube amateur chefs love food that comes in a can, in powder form, or is ready-to=bake dough in a cardboard tube. It’s more like construction than cookery. Sooner or later, everything ends up deep-fried. I haven’t seen them deep-frying trifle yet, but give it time. All you actually need to do if you fancy becoming an internet ‘chef’ is to deep-fry an apple, cover it in melted processed cheese and sprinkle crumbled nachos or graham crackers on top. Nailed it.

I know, I know. It’s just fun. These ideas are creative, amusing, and no worse than making parmesan tuiles or melting boiled sweets to make the windows of gingerbread houses, or sprinkling crunched-up cheese and onion crisps on top of a cottage pie (all things I’ve done more than once).  Just harmless entertainment.

But are they really harmless? Surely they must be influencing people’s eating habits to some extent? After all, aren’t people who get lots of followers on the net known as ‘influencers’? These ubiquitous videos normalize high-calorie, low-nutrient foods, giving the impression that it’s fine to stuff your face regularly with empty carbs. And the number of overweight cats I’ve seen online suggests that we don’t stop with ourselves – we inflict our dreadful eating habits on our pets too. I used to worry that my own cat was overweight, but he was actually a svelte cat-about-town compared to some of the poor cats I’ve seen on You Tube videos, waddling around looking like they’ve swallowed a sofa cushion.

And as for the craft videos…Well, I admit, there are some that are fabulous, but these tend to be the ones created by actual artists and craftspeople. You know, those experts in wood-turning and glass-blowing, furniture-making and house-building, oil painting and embroidery, who make fabulous videos showing off their terrific skills.

But, come on, we’ve all seen the others, haven’t we? The people who take a perfectly nice glass jar, line it with wallpaper off-cuts, handwrite something trite on the front in felt-tip, and tie a bit of old sacking round its neck, then triumphantly place it on a windowsill with a self-satisfied smile and the words ‘There, see how easy it is to make a vintage swear jar?’ Or they decoupage an old chair until it’s an eye-crossing mess of sub-Laura Ashley/Cath Kidston chintz, then paint the spokes of the chair-back silver, edged with rhinestones ‘for that finishing touch’.

I have absolutely no objection to these people doing these things.  If people want to fill their houses with tat, if it makes them feel good, in the privacy of their own homes, then I say gild away, Modge-Podge to your heart’s content, cover every inch of your walls in stencilled cats and every item of furniture in covers made from old nighties. Go ahead, buy a glue-gun. And I don’t even have a problem with you videoing yourselves while you’re at it, if that’s what gets you up in the mornings.

I just object to the videos being put on You Tube where I find myself being drawn into this world where everyone seems to have too much time on their hands. I’m enchanted by their optimistic tone of voice, by the promise of magical transformation, by their assurances – against all my prior experience – that they will create something valuable out of something valueless. Then I’m horrified by what they actually produce and how much time I’ve wasted watching them produce it.

I mean, I saw someone make a pair of earrings the other day out of two slices of pepperoni encased in a circle of resin. Yes, really.

The worst ones are those who are actually quite skilled and who make something that seems to be a great idea for recycling old products that would otherwise be thrown into landfill. These are the videos that make it look both easy and worthwhile. I could do that, you naively think. I once watched someone make an attractive, sturdy bowl for storing knitting paraphernalia, out of a pair of old jeans and a cardboard shoe box, but when I had a go at making it, it took me three weeks and looked like a hat that had been trodden on by a carthorse then worn by a hobo for three years. And I don’t even know how to knit, so I have no use for a knitting storage bowl anyway.

It seems to me that for every gifted sculptor or astonishingly talented artist showing off their skill, there are twenty-four videos of Mrs Smith from number 23 hot-glueing an old ice-cream carton to a strip of Weetabix box. For every Walter Santi video of the fabulous Indie, cat goalkeeper extraordinaire, or Porthos, Master of Parkour, there are fifty videos of morbidly obese felines getting stuck in cat flaps. And for every Jamie Oliver recipe or Gordon Ramsay masterclass, there are eighteen idiots deep-frying custard, or stuffing squashes with scrambled egg and smoked salmon (which actually doesn’t sound that bad, now I come to think about it. I might get my video camera out and give it a go…)