PROCESS 02: Oven Chips

The freedom and shame, the agony and the ecstasy

The brand of oven chips you had at teatime was a status symbol when I was a kid. McCain’s Home Fries were the holy grail—if you were having those with your Turkey Drummers, you’d really made it. It’s really strange, I didn’t consider oven chips and deep fryer chips and chippy chips as the same thing. It didn’t occur to me until much later on in life that oven chips were meant to be approximations of the soggy, vinegar-coated potato hunks I was used to from Sam’s Bar on Morecambe seafront. Don’t get me wrong, I loved both of them. But they just weren’t the same food at all. They didn’t even speak the same language.

There’s something shameful to me about not cooking tea, and instead bunging a tray of frozen chips and chicken kievs in the oven. Why? I guess it's a deep-rooted patriarchal expectation. Maybe I feel like I’m letting myself and my family (Tom) down. Or maybe it’s because of the onslaught of fresh food propaganda we’ve had over the past decade. If you forfeit freshly prepared food for pre-prepared options you will surely succumb to high blood pressure and heart disease. It’s also certainly something to do with my unhealthy relationship with food that I’ve lived with most of my life. If I peel the potatoes, chop them, I have control. If I pour them perfectly portioned and prepared from a bag, I could be eating literally anything.

It’s so strange, this idea of convenience food being the enemy. It was invented as a liberation of sorts—to enable busy people to eat hot meals when time was short and money was tight. Microwave meals took off in the 80s, especially in the US, but for me as a northerner during the early 90s, what really changed the landscape was oven-ready food from the freezer section. Even then during the heady days of oven pizzas and fish fingers, there was a nasty tone to the way people talked about them.