Output details

Five Easy Ways With Chilli

Commissioned by Sweet Talk Productions and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, this story was researched according to the theme ‘the foods of love and hate’. The commission demanded thinking in new ways about how to use food in a story. Research entailed studying recipes and cookbooks, magazine food writing, and also the kind of magazine story aimed at character identification through taste and choice. The story turns on the choice of a single foodstuff – chilli – as the common factor in a character’s life, tracing her adolescence and young-adulthood through her experiences with chilli. At the beginning of the story chilli functions as an objective correlative that suggests love, hope, warmth and romance. But the character is burned both by the chilli and, more metaphorically, her romantic experiences, and the story ends ambiguously, without any chilli at all (although there is hope that it will come back into her life in the future). The research content of the story also includes some experimentation with style and tone. The central character of the story, ‘you’, is also its addressee, and her life-experiences are presented as if they were recipes, or at least suggestions for recipes. When food is encountered in fiction is it often sexual, ‘delicious’, ‘sumptuous’ and so on, and this was reinforced by the brief Thomas was given for the story. Wishing to begin to undermine that brief a little, and so trouble certain complacencies, Thomas used chilli as a way of thinking about both love and violence. As well as appearing in home-cooked, attractive meals that will be eaten with a lover, it is encountered in late-night snacks, fast food and convenience food that is eaten alone – not entirely salutary experiences.