Pride cometh before a full tummy

The 21st century, much like its antecedent the 20th, lacks the spirit of community once treasured by our forebears. This, it seems, owes greatly to how our attitude to food has morphed over the intervening decades. Instead of being rightly considered the sublime coalescence of protector and lover – soulful life-giving mother; pleasure-bound and passion-raising seductress – food has been relegated to the office of medicine, or worse, fuel. With this relegation has come the ever-depressing stratification of consumption: eating is over with as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Porridge is endorsed as brilliant breakfast fodder because it is 'filling', not because it is delicious. Dietitians advocate mackerel and salmon for their brain-boosting oils, not their sumptuous soft-bellied scrumptiousness. Avocados, walnuts, cranberries - all delicious and all paradoxically belittled by their superfood status. Nobody lingers over dinner any more, and certainly nobody wants to do it together. Food has become detached, a pathetic nonentity in the swirling cosmos of our days, taking up space and wasting our time.

Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong. Food was, is and forever will be about life, about people, about society. It keeps us alive and cements us together. It is the very thread by which the fabric of life is held in place, the culinary cross-stitch of community. Thankfully, there remain institutions that remind us of this. ScotFest, Alva's celebration of Scottish food and crafts, is one such. The sense of interwoven community was raw, rural and fraternal. Unlike those battling with trolleys in Tesco or shuffling along the Subway queue, these people were alive with the hearty fervour of revelers enjoying good food for its own sake. And what an educative revelry it proved.

Perhaps this constitutes an unfair precedent, but it surprises me that Scottish produce can be so various and so good. Further, that Scotland can superbly deliver its own take on culinary classics. Hitherto it seemed incongruous for terrines and blue cheeses to belong anywhere outside French gastronomic territory, but the Sunnyside Farm and Choc 'n' Cheese company have seen to that fallacy. The veal, pork and thyme terrine was gutsily rustic and headily aromatic with that great king of British herbs; the meat was grainy and dense with a sweetly silken jelly, cracking on good bread. The Strathdon Blue was the best blue cheese – perhaps bar the most majestic Gorgonzola dolce – I have ever had the fortune to taste: smooth like velveteen cream, pungent as the sharpest, spikiest lime, sublime tanginess. Caseic perfection.

Turning analogically to the West Country, Scotland does damn good fudge and cider too. The Galloway Fudge Company begets morsels worthy of comparison alongside the finest of Cornish offerings. The Really Raspberry Ripple is just that, thickly luscious vanilla fudge packed to the rafters with the zingiest of Scottish raspberries, the first raspberry-ripple concoction I have ever tried to taste of real fruit. I bought almost a kilo. Alcoholically speaking, the Scottish repertoire reaches far beyond whisky to the Somersetian land of cider-ville. Almost wincingly sharp and sparklingly quenching, the offerings of Thistly Cross Cider are the answer to any Scotland resident’s cideric dreams.

This could not be known were it not for the communal success of the food festival. Eat, drink and live together. Simply put, revel in the glory of food.