Sitwell considers picnic an ugly word.
He starts the essay “Sing High! Sing Low!” without equivocating. Then, he finds picnics excellent opportunities to act as the noble savage in a controlled natural setting, a continuation of the perpetual picnic of Adam and Eve.
Sitwell asserts picnicking is a social event and that you cannot picnic alone: “Yet, how little in reality have food and drink to do with a picnic and its enjoyment! You must, it is true, have something to eat, but mood, companions, scene are everything.” The food of a perfect picnic, Sitwell thinks, should be of the earth: bread, goat cheese, apples, celery, bilberries, and fruits of the month—“nothing lethal or botulistic.”
See Osbert Sitwell’s “Picnics and Pavilions” in Sing High! Sing Low. (Macmillan: London, 1944)