One is the Loneliest Number

Broken hearts and break-ups take the wind from your sails, the serotonin from your brain and the voluminosity from your heart, and on top of all that, they completely muck up your diet. After you've gotten over the obligatory loss of appetite stage your left feeling less than enthused, not only by the thought of food, but by the actual process of acquiring it and cooking it.

Cooking for one is a lonely endeavour. Cooking is the joy of the lovers, partners, couples, also known now as the mortal enemy. Glued to one another, kissing and clasping the stirring spoon together, feeding eachother baby tomatoes and 'accidentally' getting sauce places where they have to lick it off. 

Now you are a heartbroken one, singular. S.I.N.G.L.E, and you've been relegated to the ready-meal for one section, the supermarket equivalent of the self help isle in a library.

Fish pie; 'Ten Ways To Mend Your Broken Heart', Spaghetti Carbonara; 'Coming To Terms With The Fact That You're Going To Die Alone And Get Eaten By Your Cats.'  
You loiter near by, browsing the titles from a distance, then swoop in like an eagle and grab that Cottage Pie; 'How To Survive The Loss Of Love', and get the hell out of there like it never happened. And then to the self service you go, because a machine can't smell your loneliness, a machine won't look at you with pitying eyes, like you're a baby hedgehog, a lonely baby hedgehog. Baby hedgehog eyes are everywhere these days, and you don't need it.

Ready-meal for one and a bottle of wine, bag it, sigh through your nose, eyes down, frump out the automatic doors, passed the meal-for-two section that you used to peruse with your partner. Ahh yes! Back when you were a two, now you are a one and you are living on a diet of fish fingers with whirlpools of ketchup, chicken dippers with whirlpools of ketchup and those damn ready-meals for one often with whirlpools of ketchup. But at least you haven't reached as low as a green pot noodle yet or meat from a tin, that will be the nadir. 

You were so adventurous in a couple, whole new culinary experiences lay out before you, and you forged forward like an intrepid food warrior. You were one of those people who had homemade stock in their freezer and always, always a full fat fridge, packed with healthy nutritious foods, like delicatessen pate, asparagus and fancy smelly cheeses. 

You bought herbs, you actually gathered up a collection of those little bottled herbs, you had so many you had to actually buy a herb rack to put them all in, now they lie dormant, disappointed, un-used. You bought fancy baking trays, expensive pots, coloured spatulas, a slow-cooker, a bread-maker, an egg-poacher and cook books. Piles and piles of big fat cook books; Delia, Jamie, Nigella, Hugh, Nigel, Heston, Ottolenghi, even Gordan Bloody Ramsey, a different meal for every night of the week, made with love. The new shiny things lay strewn around, rendered obsolete by the loss of the love that has vanished. 
That bloody egg-poacher with its 4 half-circular egg holes sits in a crepuscular corner, mocking you, teasing the idea of your lonely egg, "one poached egg for the loser", it whispers. You're done with poached eggs.

All you need now is a microwave, you have become a culinary recluse. Once a lionhearted explorer and experimenter in the kitchen, you are now a professional micro-waver and griller of chicken dippers. You have gone from metaphorically climbing Mount Everest with your cooking, to quite literally walking to Tesco and swooping for meals-for-one like a big lonely eagle.

But as those annoying people say (usually members of happy couples), "time heals all wounds". They are right. Soon your culinary inquisitiveness will start to come back. Your heart will mend. And you'll crack out the slow-cooker and the bread-maker and the egg-poacher, and you'll cook, you'll cook with the ferocity of Marco Pierre White and the gentle passion of Rick Stein. There'll be no more eagle swooping in Tesco. You'll even start using the herbs again, except Fenugreek, that was an impulse buy in the throws of passion one day in Waitrose, back when you were in love. But fear not intrepid food warrior, there will once again come a day when you will buy some redundant herb, besottedly fumbling down some lovestruck isle of an otherwise dreary supermarket. 
Just you wait and see.

The Fish Fight, for Eat Me Magazine

When you get your peachy, permeable heart gets broken people often say the old quip, 'plenty more fish in the sea', which of course brings no solace whatsoever, but it's still a nice thought. However, if things within the fishing industry carry on the way they are this inspirited thought will soon become nothing but a spurious quibble, like, 'it's not you, it's me.' 

The fight for sustainable fishing is one of the most poignant topics in our current society, and one that must be realised and addressed before our vast oceans become barren places. According to the UN, half of the world's fish stocks are fully exploited, and another quarter overfished. There's something fishy going on for sure. 

The main villain encumbering sustainable fishing is the European Commission and their crazy Common Fishery Policy laws. Within these laws lies the quota system, which is intended to protect fish stocks by setting limits on how many fish of a certain species can be caught. Once a quota is reached, fishermen are no longer allowed to land any of the over-quota fish, so if they catch them, which their fishing methods make it impossible not to, they have no choice but to throw them overboard, usually already dead. This is known as discard. In the world of sustainable fishing, 'discard' is a dirty, dirty word. (Like clotted cream at a Weight Watchers meeting). The EU estimates that in the North Sea, discards are between 40% and 60% of the total catch, which is quite a harrowing statistic and a wicked waste of nutritious food. 

It's a case of what you don't see, doesn't hurt you. Imagine seeing a big pile of dead baby lambs at the side of road, you'd be devastated, you'd cry your eyes out. But that would only ever happen in the dark recesses of some maniacs imagination. Discard is a reality. It is happening right now. All those little fishies floating gently through the blue water, down, down, down into the darkness, hundreds of them, thousands of them. It needs to stop. NOW.

As Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, sustainable fishing warrior, pioneer of the Hugh's Fish Fight, says, "It's not just bad, it's mad." Hugh has come caterwauling in with his floppy hair blowing in the wind, zealous in his mission to promulgate the horrors of over fishing and discarding. And he's done a bloody good job too. Thanks to the Fish Fight and the propensity of our online age to ignite democratic revolutions, Hugh and 700,000+ of us have forced the European Commission to propose a ban on discarding. However there is another 18months to go before the new Common Fisheries Policy becomes law, so there is still work to be done to ensure the success of the ban and the future of long term sustainable fishing. 

So what can we do? Well, we are not blameless, in fact we are the opposite of blameless, basically we are largely 'to blame'. Our unadventurous fish eating habits have caused the over fishing of certain species. Here in the UK cod, salmon and tuna account for 50% of our fish consumption. We need to give these species a break, expand our fish-eating minds and start dancing to a different tuna, if you'll pardon the pun. 

Nobody likes change, we are pertinacious old fools, set in our ways, the thought of having chips with any fish other than cod is unthinkable to us. We turn our noses up at lesser-known fish species, but there are far sexier fish out there. We need to be adventurous, discover the mysteries of mackerel, the curiosities of coley, the wonders of whiting, the delectability of dab and the voluptuousness of flounder. If we are more diverse with which fish we stick our forks into, then the other vulnerable species will get a chance to recover and replenish, and our oceans will be happily bulging with fish once again. Another thing we can do is get our local chippies involved in the 'Mackerel Mission', get them serving up Hugh's mackerel bap, and get the ball rolling on changing the nations fish eating habits. Mackerel is tasty, cheap and has great health benefits (rich in Omega 3's), it's quite the catch really.

So go on, don't be a cod-forsaken idiot all your life, broaden your fishy horizons. Sign the Fish Fight petition today and download the Fish Fight app for lots of recipe ideas using lesser-known fish, like porgy. What a cool name.

Long live Mr.Cod, Mrs.Salmon and Uncle Tuna.

http://www.fishfight.net
http://www.fish2fork.com
http://thejore.com/#1073227/we-love-fish

http://www.eatmemagazine.com/sustainable-fishing/

...on the 18th of June while i was eating a milky way

Heartbreak is a pain universally acknowledged. When going through heartbreak, this fact brings no solace whatsoever. In that moment when your permeable peachy heart gets squashed like a kiwi, a pain tiptoes over your body like dew tickles over a leaf. All the world seems to stop and sit still on its spin and the colour drains from everything, like sand from an egg-timer. Egg-timers, like most things, are now of course superfluous because time itself is meaningless. Without love time is only sad memories of morning moments in bed and kisses. All time from this moment forward, will be nothing but counted seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months, from this moment, when the world sat still on its spin.

And then the tears, fat, hot, salty tears, hundreds of them, thousands of them, big salty puddles of oceanic tears for hours and hours and days and days. You can't move. Breathing makes you cry.

You don't want to go outside, because couples are everywhere out there, swanning around rubbing their love in your face. You want to run them all over with a sit on lawnmower. 

When you eventually manage to scrape yourself from your tear-filled mattress and attempt life, you see their name in the letters of all other words, on the tube, on the bus, even in the bath where there are no words, you see their name. And everything reminds you of them, brushing your teeth; they used to brush their teeth, walking; they used to walk, breathing; they used to breathe. And you hate them, god how you hate them, you find yourself writing "DIE" on everything and wishing that they would go bald.

And you'll be drinking a lot, you'll basically be two glasses away from actually turning into a bottle of Merlot. Merlot helps. Merlot is your friend. Merlot is your new girlfriend. Merlot would NEVER hurt you like she did.

Most things in life at this time are treacherous, but none more so than your ipod, it is a treacherous war zone. You never realised before but every song ever written is about love, and you HATE love, love is the enemy. Shuffling is like russian roulette, Sinead O' Connor's 'Nothing Compares To You' will come up, as will Celine Dion's 'All By Myself' and then to top it all off, 'your song' will almost definitely come up, the first note of which entering your ear will send you into an uncontrollable outburst of those hot, salty, tears. So you'll make a playlist which will almost definitely include Kelis's 'Caught Out There' and The J.Geils Band's 'Love Stinks' and you'll listen to a hell of a lot of Cher.

You'll swear that you'll never fall in love again, and you'll silently resign yourself to the fact that you're going to die alone and get eaten by your cats. Joni Mitchell said that all romantics meet the same fate one day, cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe. She's right. You are now a romantic atheist.

You'll wish for a wooden heart like a carousel horse, in fact you'll wish you were a carousel horse, or any inanimate object unable to feel any emotion. You'll wish you were a shoe. A shoe could never feel pain like you're feeling right now.

You'll want to call them, you probably will when you're drunk, you'll delete their number to be safe, but you know it off by heart, and it's just as hard to erase from your memory as they are. You have gone insane.

Facebook is another treacherous war zone and should be avoided at all costs for at least two weeks, because they are ALL over Facebook getting on with their life, they are all over your wall and your inbox and your pictures and you can't 'de-friend' them because you'll look immature. But you'd love nothing more than to 'de-friend' them, 'de-friending' them isn't a patch on what you'd actually like to do to them. You hope they get alopecia.

You'll find yourself drunk and crying at bus stops bending the ear off a stranger, telling them how you give her everything and she crushed you like a mouse. You'll find yourself crying a lot, in fact you'll find yourself crying everywhere, even in Tesco, because when you're heartbroken, choices are hard, you'll cry because you can't decide whether to buy a banana or an apple, neither of which you want, because you don't have any appetite, she took that along with everything else. But, hey, at least your ass is getting smaller, (every cloud). 

And then, a month will have passed, (you will of course know the exact second that a month passes) and things are feeling less painful. You no longer have to make yourself breathe in and out. The sky is a little bluer, the world is a little less drab. Thoughts of her are fewer and less destroying. 

You have now entered 'the worst is over' stage. You will never again feel the pain that you have felt in the last month. Some days you even smile. When you think of them you don't want to a) die b) cry c) punch their face. You're not angry, you're not sad, you're not really anything anymore. You also have your iPod back, and you can shuffle like it's 1999, you can even handle Sinead O' Connor.

Soon you will meet as other people do, you'll work no magic for her, nor her for you. And you will be free. You will have made it through one of the most painful of all pains known to humanity, and you'll be stronger, wiser and thinner.

Until then, remember; if you're going through hell, keep going.