My grandmother never ate mushrooms. I could not understand it. I thought they were the most delicious thing on the planet. I asked her why and she said ‘You see-I never ate them as a child. We just did not eat them. And something you do not eat as a child…you rarely learn how to eat later’. I was curious about that. My grandmother’s family did not eat mushrooms. They lived in a town, not in a village. To get mushrooms-you need to pick them in the forest. Central Ukraine in year 1914 was not known for its supermarkets. To pick them-you need to know an awful lot about them, otherwise you are at a risk of serious poisoning and death. Given the lack of effortless lifestyle-based knowledge and the risks, it is easy to see why they never ate them. But: is that true that childhood determines your taste for the rest of your life?
Before I was six I...
Life offers few certainties but there are surely advantages to being a demographer and a country bumpkin. It makes you less cynical where most people are, and more cynical where trepidation is expected. The good place to start this essay is to say that I self-identify as a country bumpkin for a good reason. There are just three places I lived in and know well. Just three. One is a godforsaken location in the South-West of today’s Russia that might as well remain nameless, who cares after all..? Is it not just bears drinking vodka and playing balalaikas there? Another one is the majestic Jerusalem, second to none, I might have been born there if not the Romans. None of them prepared me for the third, and so far, the last: the South of England, the United Kingdom. Cambridge, to be precise. There are other small stations in the middle but they matter less for the purpose of this story.
When...