Ben Okri

Ben Okri || Life on a plate (The Guardian)

It’s a mystery to me why Nigerian food is not better known. It can only be the prejudice of poor exposure. I once took Antonio Carluccio to my favourite Nigerian restaurant in London and he raved at the revelation. But it was too late in his career to champion what might become the next great discovery in international cuisine. The moment now feels right.

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I lived on the streets after I’d returned to London. I’d been at Essex University. There had been great canteens and people inviting you into their flats for dinners. Politicians back home stopped paying for my scholarship, so I was told: “You have to leave, old boy.”

When you are hungry it seems all the books you’re reading are full of feasts. Food shines when you’re deprived of it.

One night I was wandering around in London, starving, with manuscripts under my arm. You have to understand – I was in my early 20s, so in my mind, the writing, living on the streets, the starvation were all bound up together. It wasn’t hell to me – it was half-romantic. I stopped outside a restaurant with a glass front in Notting Hill and watched for a long time all these folks eating gorgeous steaks, chicken and pasta. That image has really stayed with me. So when I’m the one having a nice dinner and I catch a glimpse of the window and someone’s looking in, it flips me out a bit.

There’s an acute relationship between the taste of food and the state of mind of the person cooking it. I asked Mum once why her omelettes taste so good and she said: “I alwaysmake them when I’m in a special state of mind.”

Salman Rushdie took me out to an Indian place in Islington. He’d won the Booker prize when I was working on The Famished Road, which I then won my Booker with. He was very kind, talking about liking the lean dry writing in my Stars of the New Curfew. He’s a big foodie. At the time he was fascinated by bread cultures.He kept eating rice with his hands. That was very sweet. It touched me.

There are some foods that make you carnal, some aggressive, some that calm you down, some conducive to thought or to argument. It’s not for nothing that when people start on a spiritual journey their diet changes. Food and personal spiritual development is very interesting – not least in fasting. It’s not much talked about, but fasting can cleanse the appetite and return one’s senses to zero. Astonishing The Gods was written while fasting.

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