The Age of Dip
Holly Pester on dip for dinner in the 1990s. Illustration by Sinjin Li.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Each Monday we publish a different piece of writing related to food, whether it’s an essay, a dispatch, a polemic, a review, or even poetry. In today’s essay, Holly Pester writes about the delights and politics of the 4-way Dip Selection of the 1990s.
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The Age of Dip
Holly Pester on dip for dinner in the 1990s. Illustration by Sinjin Li.
I have thoughts about dip. Particularly the 4-way ‘Dip Selection’ that became popular in Britain in the mid-1990s. And therefore I also have thoughts about the specific context of class narratives and family economies that emerged then. My own trajectory through that decade, being fed dip, a lot, being in the presence of dip, often, being transitioned into a consuming (snacking) and life-building adult, was inflected by these narratives. Which is why, like a good post-modern offspring of hope and irony, I am fixated on dip (and crisps of course, as an affix). I am fixated on this substance that vacillates between nourishment and gesture, saying something about both decadence and impoverishment, saying so much about the cultural-political arc of, say, 1994 to the early 2000s, and the limited means of making a life available to people living on, around and under the poverty line. There’s a correlation, for me, between real-life dips in circumstance and the actual creamy, garlicky, herby stuff, what it meant and what we felt.
My story begins just after the early-90s recession, with the ascension of New Labour, building up to their election in 1997. I was in a single-parent family – a group left completely skint after years of Thatcherism, which punished the ‘downwardly mobile’ with even more entrenched poverty. While New Labour continued Thatcherism, it also brought with it some very substanceless ideas of hope in the future, symbolised for me by dip.
The age of dip, then, is also the age of my mum’s burgeoning new life, and social life. Just into her 40s she was suddenly, after brief homelessness, both apparently middle-class and a precarious renter, forced to move house every few years, a single mum-of-three with benefits supplementing two small wages to also cover a night course. She made friends with other exhausted localish single mothers and together they did what the married, crudités-ing, stabled-homed mothers of my friends seemed not to do very much: they socialised. They had regular gatherings, listened to late-80s-era Van Morrison really loud, drank, smoked and snacked.Â
Dip was essential to this culture. And I very specifically mean the newly available 4-way plastic trays of dip, with the slimy peel-off lid that is now immediately stuck to the side of the bin in my mind. Each little compartment contained a dip, with varying combinations of cheese and chive, a very sweet and pungent taramasalata, sour cream and garlic, salsa, Thousand Island, maybe something like guacamole, and a stinky orange one that no one understood – possibly cheesy ‘Mexican’ flavour that was the same pinky colour as when my grandma added milk to her bottle of ketchup to make it last longer. The dip tray was a supermarket product oozing forth from a notion of sophistication that came to us distorted from a US sitcom or someone else’s continental holiday. The dipping crisp was extremely richly flavoured but somehow rustic. It stung the roof of your mouth with flavourings but also tasted like meals, whole meals.
The dip parties took place in what I remember as uninterrupted feminine ambience; our rented houses and flats with soft Ikea lamp lighting, dangerously bubbling incense burners giving an aura to the entire operation of opening and pouring a bottle of wine – the cork squeak, pop and glug, the way my mum held the wine glass to her mouth and pouted, the way her friends would smoke, lifting their hands up and down between the ashtray and the jingling snack bowls of salted peanuts, talking about men, money, work. We hungry tweens, commingled as afterthoughts by the noisy TV, were keen to participate in the snacking, kneeling up to the small coffee table as soon as a big bag of Kettle Chips was emptied into a bowl. We would quickly learn the improvised etiquette of dipping: politely paced scooping, avoiding clashing, no cross-dipping, no double-dipping, no overeating (try as we might). No getting carried away! As a prototype 90s teenager, this kind of eating was really sensational. I was a brand-new subject, cultivating a sense of self through eating practices in lieu of something more materially stable, happily participating in a kind of anchor of habits through selection – reaching and dipping – and sketching out a social shape where more permanent and comfortable structures for living might be.Â
This was the cuisine of young single mothers who loved packaged ‘party food’ a lot more than meals. Shop-bought dip was in and material signifiers of class were about to get messily mixed-up. No one could really afford anything, the economic boom was happening to other people, but the brightly coloured and potent dips seemed classy to us. They were indulgent, sort of gross, ideal for hosting and feeding with the least effort. This kind of dip now symbolises a lot of that era, food for those aiming for something more, who were tired but alive and suddenly younger, getting poorer and richer in a melange of contradictory ways. I learned to eat and exist within a given economy. Food budgets and social aspirations dripped over the sides of sensible parameters, and my family, dip-eaters in an almost permanent housing crisis, were looking for a new culture to align with.
The gloopy, synthetic 1990s spawned genres of snacking foods like dip and crisps and class hybrids such as ‘boho middle-class’ – that is, poor, educated and aspiring to be cultured, but at the mercy of housing and benefit policies that forced non-nuclear families into precarity and debt. Single mothers, bizarrely vilified by the Tories, were a growing category of this class. Tony Blair (Prince Dip?) was on his way, with New Labour’s love of deep credit and abstractions of living into lifestyle providing the vacuousness and viscosity. Cooking had been solved by convenience food, with some convenience food becoming a little bit gourmet (I remember one day a neighbour came over with a carton of Covent Garden soup, just to show us). A new kind of casual-but-not-casual (special-but-not-special) eating started, and we were in on it, tearing open new kinds of packaging and lids that made cheap food look fancy. The job of this food was not so much to provide sustenance as to cohere an occasion – bodies organised around a bowl, interacting with its appurtenances – for disparate low-income people with middle-class ideas. We were a new category of family, and the new category of foodstuff co-emerged for us. We were deviants, rebelliously ostentatious. We were pretty hungry, actually. We were also socially optimistic and as dippers, so 1990s.
It’s interesting to consider the relationship of this kind of eating to the idea of ‘provision’. What were we actually eating? (Were our parents still post-rationing in the 90s? Were we still rebuilding? Dreaming up a future through forms of synthetic food?) Dip and crisps sit outside the mainstream of the meal and mean more symbolically than they actually offer in terms of food – the frisson of eating food that consists mainly of ‘a starter’. Was this the era of starting, always starting but never getting to anything solid or definite? The fact is that while dip and crisps and free-school-meal greasy chips – the food I was raised on – are hyper-productive in terms of class signifiers, they represent hardly any actual sustenance.
The budget of single mothers on benefits is scrutinised, politicised, and shamed in every political era. In the 1990s the rhetoric wasn’t so much, ‘Why don’t you just make slow-cooked lentil stews and porridge every single day?’ like it is now, but something more like, ‘Yikes what the hell are you?’ In terms of provision, the dips of my childhood were interestingly limited and excessive at once, every ‘choice’ of dip composed of the same ingredients except varying levels of processed soured cream, salt and colouring, in four little enclosures like suburban gardens, mean portions sectioned off as options for one’s developing taste, one of the quasi-culinary flavours becoming your favourite, creating micro-moments of consumer choice. They represented small portions that kept us within a certain range of existence, so mean, so nibbly and meted out on one hand, and on the other a kind of jouissance of being and becoming middle-class. The limits of the budget: breached; the quantities of fat and salt: over-the-top. It was fantastically surplus, and a processed and coloured form of unhealthiness that middle-class people don’t think applies to them.Â
Here’s a figurative dip. A less joyful development in my life of eating took place in my early 20s, against a backdrop of the fake, evil nutritionists on the TV who distorted and medicalised our idea of eating into a sickness. It was the early noughties and I was stuck in a five-year loop of sofa-surfing, returning home, flat-sitting and short-term house-shares, sponsored by one-to-two-week temping jobs. The snacking rhythm in this period of my life formed around the most austere and tasteless, calorie-less and yet somehow ‘healthy’ food I could afford. My highly controlled diet was plain crackers with grated carrot and seeds, plain oats, and 2L a day of bottled water. This hyper-reaction to scarcity and lack of comfort has a parallel in the 90s and my teenage era – of having good stuff yet not really considering its value or effect or cost – in that it featured acts of eating that replaced any other kind of security. This time the food was flavourless and gritty, more like a foundational material to rebuild from, more like the mortar a home is made of. The problem was I became obsessed with eating this stuff and developed an eating disorder. Constantly and anxiously, all day and sometimes in the middle of the night, if I woke up and panicked about money, I’d portion out a small dish of brown, dry matter and eat it like a rat, then return to either writing job applications or bed. This was eating as an attempt to be grounded, schooled by the idea that hunger could be cured by another self-regulated hunger.Â
This latter phase of eating was also a reaction against the former: an attempt to live within a sensible (impossible) route out of poverty, and to train my body, harshly, away from indulgence into low levels of need and subsistence. I was rebelling against the family’s lack and its indulgence, and trying to become fit for society. In retrospect, I gained more political identity from dip. I’ve tried to reconcile this: even when I return home and feel infuriated to find my mum’s fridge still empty of anything nutritious but full of gunks (!), and even as the food-blender-owning bourgeois individual that I am now, I am certain that there was an activation of consciousness in that having and choosing, and dipping and enjoying, as the final demand letters mounted up on the other side of the table. Let’s see. Is it political, in an environment of little other than instability, to blast one’s benefits on something as irrational as dip? Yes. Poor people eating dip for dinner is political. And is it meaningful to stick a crisp into dip? Well … flavour is exaggeration, an enhancement of distinction between one thing and another. The repetition of acts, which emphasises our attraction to one flavour over another, is a miniature version of how we practise desire and definition in life. In dipping we can begin cultivating a fidelity of self. That’s meaningful. Also, my mum just preferred the party-like joy of dip and crisps to actual food, the whoohoo of shopping. Without the knowledge of how to shop resourcefully and prepare nourishing, low-cost meals, she wanted to buy a few nibbles rather than ingredients. What kind of cultural heritage is this? A very 90s one. And also a kind of decadence, formed from within poverty, that I’ve come to cherish. Decadence in poverty is a work of art in life, a releasing into indulgence. It is a reaction against precarity to create a style of behaviour instead of home. No one can take style away from you. Ask a dandy. When your styles of habit form a situation of stability – habits instead of habitats – you’ve got some agency, you’ve got a combination of actions and appetites. We can eat to create. Eat ourselves richer.Â
Credits
Holly Pester is a poet, writer and academic. Pester’s collection of poetry, Comic Timing (2021), and her novel, The Lodgers (2024), are both out with Granta. More about information about her work can be found here and here.Â
Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy, and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry, among many other themes. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li.
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Having so loved and admired Holly Pester's novel, The Lodger, 'dip for dinner' feels like the perfect companion piece. Especially this: "Decadence in poverty is a work of art in life, a releasing into indulgence. It is a reaction against precarity to create a style of behaviour instead of home. No one can take style away from you. Ask a dandy". Truly original, evocative, insightful voice.
As the child of a single mother and teenager in the 1990s, this is very resonant - and also beautifully observed. (The weird cheese one always remained uneaten - the coconut Quality Street of dips).