GLOBAL WARNING

You won't find garlic in my kitchen. I've declared war on it. My war started probably twenty years ago. I was constantly wondering "what's that vile smell?" What it was was the garlic, hanging in a larder and polluting the air of the house.
I defy a man to enjoy kissing a woman who has done garlic in the last twelve hours. Ugh. You'd need to be desperate indeed.
Some years ago, when my sons used to come to me for weekends, they were packed off with a spaghetti Bolognese supper by my ex, so that embracing them was a struggle. A vindictive tactic, or a coincidence? Let's be magnanimous.
Garlic is everywhere these days, despite its vileness. It has colonised commercial cookery and ingredients. It's the universal  inclusion. When the Missus returns from a working week, her need for food on the go means unwittingly consuming the evil bulb. It's in soups, sandwiches, dressings, and you can't find a main course in London eateries without it. Its vile spores infect everything it touches or which touches it.
My objection is not only its stink. It is this. Garlic makes you a lazy cook. Stick some garlic in, and you think the flavouring job is done. It stops you having to think about the harmonies of flavour which in fact are at the heart of cooking artistry. Garlic dominance robs a dish of the forethought and design which are the essence, for me, of being in a kitchen.
Cooking is making stuff. Edible nice things. And to make them good, the habit of mind which is required is that of considering first what ingredients are available, then what things go with what, and what will create balance and harmony in colour, shape, taste, and  texture. Garlic takes one (and maybe even  more than one) of those factors away. It's a flavour fascist.
There is nothing much that garlic can do that a reasonably skilled cook can't do with onions and leeks. But there's many a cook who automatically includes garlic, prey to its orthodoxy of universal inclusion, and thus blinded to his rightful duty to consider the flavour he is trying to create. With garlic you can't create any flavour, except garlic.
What about garlic bread? It's a fair cop, I admit. I like it. Between consenting adults. And when a treaty has been signed that both parties will partake. Then garlic has been mutually chosen as THE flavour of culinary goings on, much as one might sanction a little light BDSM in the bedroom. Occasionally. And not as a drug of choice. Certainly not to the extent that one becomes in thrall to the habit.
It's not a bad analogy. Tied up on a universal garlic-rack, we're in danger of mistaking simple monochromatic objectified food sex for what should be a deeper, more complex, more lasting relationship with flavour.
Food, after all, is an expression of love.