I've just made a sandwich for my lunch at work. Nothing to get exited about there you say, but wait on! I threw the first three pieces of bread I took from the bag away - they were so flimsy as a result of all of the fibre and nutritional goodness being washed out of them, so full of air pockets and holes, that they fell apart in my hand on the way from the wrapper to the work-surface. Luckily I managed to get the next two onto a flat surface before they disintigrated and then glue them into slome semblance of stable rigidity with a thick layer of butter. The cheese my wife had bought (from Poundland so I shouldn't complain too much), on cutting felt decidedly rubbery for what was desribed as extea mature cheddar. I tasted a bit and wished I hadn't. A more tasteless elastic mass I have never before put into my mouth exept as a child when I used to eat my pencil-top erasers in class out of boredom with the lessons (another subject I must adress at some point!). No, I tell a lie - the erasers tasted better. This 'thing' was so far removed from anything recognisable as cheese that it could have stolen first prize in an 'animal, vegetable, mineral' competition any day of the week. I progressed to the tomato - not a good colour, not a nice red that would fire the loins of any self-respecting bull eyeing the jacket of a tourist in a west-country feild, but a wishy orange streaked yellow red, a neither here nor there red, a not really red at all red. I sliced of a ...slice. No seeds and juice - just that mushy bit that normally sits in the central section. Slice again - more mush. Slice mush. Slice mush. I breathed a bit through my nose and turned the remnant through 90 degrees. Slice mush. Eye twitch. Slice seeds! Slice seeds! At last I had hit pay-dirt and I wasn't giving up now untill the mine ran dry. Four slices in - just enough to barely cover the cheese lying like a pvc cover on my air pocket peppered bread (a culinary version of the memory foam matress) - the mine ran dry. Still it was enough. More out of a sense of cynical prescience than out of any genuine expectation I popped the last piece of tomato into my mouth. Yep - tasteless as shit. A mushy-pap pulpy mess of tastless pith and skin. Not the remotest resmblance to what a real tomato tastes like; not even in the same universe as the tomato's of my youth, those dark red sweet and juicy globes that were heaven to eat all alone with a squirt of salad cream or a shot of salt and viniger.
Somehow I had to inject some flavor into this thing that was to serve as my main sustenence in the eight hours ahead. To date the entire list of the ingedients of my sandwhich had been without exeption as devoid of anything even approaching flavor as the packaging they were wrapped in. The sweet lamb of flavor had been mercilessly hung on the foul gibbet of shelf-life, drawn on the bloody alter of processing, quatered on the smug decking of healthy eating. Anything remotely nutrtious or flavorsome had been ruthlessly extracted, mercilessly driven out, spirited away on the chariot of modern 'food science'. "The bastards! The complete bastards!", I said to myself. Little wonder that more children proportionately are being admitted to hospital with malnutrition now than were done so fifty years ago. The processing of food and the modification (genetic or otherwise) carried out to increase shelf life and thus profitability have slaughtered the nutritional value of our food. And the food industry is proud, I say proud of this! Adverts like 'Why sell them meat when you can sell them water' abound in the meat trade journals. Bakers joke that the current aim is to make as much water stand up on it's own as possible. Nutritional value is washed out of grain and used to feed pigs and we are fed the remaining husk ground up for bread and cereals. Long-life fruit is sold on the supermarket shelves as if to our advantage. 'Ripen at home peaches' that simply never ripen at all but wither dirctly from the hard unripened state they are sold in. Meat with no fat, cereal with no salt, food with no taste.
I looked disconsolately into the cuboard. Taste, taste, how to get it. Ahh - there we have it. Mustard and pickle. A good teaspoon of each and things were looking better. Against all the rules of hygene I licked the spoon clean and the resulting blast of umami made my eyes roll back in my head. There - thats what I want. I don't want to live for ever. I don't want to look like a twenty year old at eighty. I don't even mind paying a bit more for my food. Just please, please, please stop fucking around with my grub. I want to tast my food!
Thursday 30 August 2012
Tuesday 28 August 2012
When I am sixteen I can join the army and be shot at for a living. I can decide I am homosexual (or indeed heterosexual) and persue a relationship to the limits of it's ...er....limits. I can have a baby, get married, leave school, get a full time job, pay taxes and go to jail. But I can't buy a cigarette, I can't buy a drink and I can't cast a vote. Who makes up these rules?
Now I am fifty I can drink, smoke (and vote) myself to death. I can buy 2 kg of chocolate a day and eat untill I'm fifty f*****g stone - but I can't buy a breakfast cereal with enough salt in it so I can actually taste the mushy-pap crap. Who I ask again, makes up these stupid f*****g rules!
Now I am fifty I can drink, smoke (and vote) myself to death. I can buy 2 kg of chocolate a day and eat untill I'm fifty f*****g stone - but I can't buy a breakfast cereal with enough salt in it so I can actually taste the mushy-pap crap. Who I ask again, makes up these stupid f*****g rules!
"Formerly when religion was strong and science was weak, men mistook magic for medicine. Now when science is strong and religion weak men mistake medicine for magic."
So goes the quote from Thomas Szasz in his 1973 work 'Science and Scientism'. That we still place an almost unreserved trust in the medical proffession and it's ability to heal our ills goes without saying but the following two anecdotes should serve to illustrate it's limitations and bring what can and can't be expected of it back into perspective. Some ten years ago my father in law started having pains in his abdomen. he went to the doctor who diagnosed irritable bowel syndrome and prescribed a peppermint based preparation that had no effect whatsoever. For 18 or so months Ted returned intermittently to the GP with the same complaint which, while he could live with, was making his life uncomfortable. After this period had elapsed the GP referred Ted, in his 70's, to a consultant. The wait for the consultants appointment was some 6 months, by which time the trouble was getting more problematic and he was clearly loosing weight. The consultant recognised that something was amis and within two weeks Ted was attending his local hospital for scans etc to determine the nature of the problem, Sure enough the expected diagnosis of cancer of the large intestine was made and a short while later we took Ted in to have a colostomy opperation.
As we waited in the waiting room for Ted to be admitted we were given some information to read about his forthcoming opperation. Sucess (if it can be called such) was, we were informed entierly dependant on early diagnosis. The leaflet gave a range of 'five fear survival rates' based on the speed of the diagnosis being made after the condition had developed. If diagnosed in six months, survival rates after five years were good. After 1 year, a little less so. After two years (Ted's diagnosis time) the chances of being alive in five years time were pretty bleak. Given our situation I breathed hard but did not make the observation that had Teds GP reffered him at the outset then we would have been in a much better situation and it remained to be seen how much that delay was going to cost him!
The colostomy was performed and for the next 18 months or so Ted muddled along, not unwell but not well either. After this period of time he was again feeling pretty rotten and was refered again to see his consultant who carried out a colonoscopy examination and gave him the all clear. Ted began to loose weight and suffer from collapses and following a particularly nasty one of these was readmitted to hospital. A CAT scan was carried out and again the all clear was given. Ted was sent home after being given a 'talking to' by the nurse. "You have to eat." she told him. "No wonder you are falling over all the time!"
Ted returned home and tried to follow the advice but he was feeling sick all the time and couldn't keep his food down anyway. He was as thin as a stick and it was obvious he was dying. Two days after returning home he collapsed, was readmitted to hospital and an exploratory opperation carried out. When we saw the egyptian doctor who had performed this he was grave. "I'm afraid your father is dying." he said to my wife (not too great a shock as I had already told her this some weeks before), "He has no functional bowel left due to the spread of the cancer and will pass away soon." Within three days he was dead. This a man who had been given an all clear by his consultant, an all clear by a CAT scan and sent home with the instructions to 'feed himself up' all within two weeks of being dead.
My second anecdote is a sad story concerning the father of a girl I work with. The man, in his fifties, was suffering chest pains, arm pains, pains in his jaw etc (ie all the normal indicators of heart problems) and attended his GP. He was referred to a consultant and a thorough examination was carried out. He was subjected to exercise stress on the treadmill, blood samples for heart function taken, ECG's and scans perforned. Given a clean bill of health the man was sent back to work. On the strength of this even the man's family started to doubt that his symptoms were 'for real' (this was one of the hardest things of all to deal with said the girl). He returned to work and then one evening a short while later died of a massive coronary heart attack. The doctors somewhat weakly said that 'other vessels in his heart must have been taking up some of the work-load and thus disguising his symptoms'. Cold comfort to the mans family I'm afraid.
My point in recounting these sad tales is important. Medicine is not magic. Make no mistake there is far, far more that doctors do not know about what goes on inside us than what they do. But here is the thing you have to remember - doctors are trying their best. They are doing what they have been taught - and are often fooled themselves by their own press. They have allowed this image of themselves as infalable beings to be built up in the public mind and have done nothing to stop it. They have flown high on borrowed wings and it is no suprise that often do they take a fall. And one final thing; medicine may when all is said and done be pretty weak - but it's the best we've got!
So goes the quote from Thomas Szasz in his 1973 work 'Science and Scientism'. That we still place an almost unreserved trust in the medical proffession and it's ability to heal our ills goes without saying but the following two anecdotes should serve to illustrate it's limitations and bring what can and can't be expected of it back into perspective. Some ten years ago my father in law started having pains in his abdomen. he went to the doctor who diagnosed irritable bowel syndrome and prescribed a peppermint based preparation that had no effect whatsoever. For 18 or so months Ted returned intermittently to the GP with the same complaint which, while he could live with, was making his life uncomfortable. After this period had elapsed the GP referred Ted, in his 70's, to a consultant. The wait for the consultants appointment was some 6 months, by which time the trouble was getting more problematic and he was clearly loosing weight. The consultant recognised that something was amis and within two weeks Ted was attending his local hospital for scans etc to determine the nature of the problem, Sure enough the expected diagnosis of cancer of the large intestine was made and a short while later we took Ted in to have a colostomy opperation.
As we waited in the waiting room for Ted to be admitted we were given some information to read about his forthcoming opperation. Sucess (if it can be called such) was, we were informed entierly dependant on early diagnosis. The leaflet gave a range of 'five fear survival rates' based on the speed of the diagnosis being made after the condition had developed. If diagnosed in six months, survival rates after five years were good. After 1 year, a little less so. After two years (Ted's diagnosis time) the chances of being alive in five years time were pretty bleak. Given our situation I breathed hard but did not make the observation that had Teds GP reffered him at the outset then we would have been in a much better situation and it remained to be seen how much that delay was going to cost him!
The colostomy was performed and for the next 18 months or so Ted muddled along, not unwell but not well either. After this period of time he was again feeling pretty rotten and was refered again to see his consultant who carried out a colonoscopy examination and gave him the all clear. Ted began to loose weight and suffer from collapses and following a particularly nasty one of these was readmitted to hospital. A CAT scan was carried out and again the all clear was given. Ted was sent home after being given a 'talking to' by the nurse. "You have to eat." she told him. "No wonder you are falling over all the time!"
Ted returned home and tried to follow the advice but he was feeling sick all the time and couldn't keep his food down anyway. He was as thin as a stick and it was obvious he was dying. Two days after returning home he collapsed, was readmitted to hospital and an exploratory opperation carried out. When we saw the egyptian doctor who had performed this he was grave. "I'm afraid your father is dying." he said to my wife (not too great a shock as I had already told her this some weeks before), "He has no functional bowel left due to the spread of the cancer and will pass away soon." Within three days he was dead. This a man who had been given an all clear by his consultant, an all clear by a CAT scan and sent home with the instructions to 'feed himself up' all within two weeks of being dead.
My second anecdote is a sad story concerning the father of a girl I work with. The man, in his fifties, was suffering chest pains, arm pains, pains in his jaw etc (ie all the normal indicators of heart problems) and attended his GP. He was referred to a consultant and a thorough examination was carried out. He was subjected to exercise stress on the treadmill, blood samples for heart function taken, ECG's and scans perforned. Given a clean bill of health the man was sent back to work. On the strength of this even the man's family started to doubt that his symptoms were 'for real' (this was one of the hardest things of all to deal with said the girl). He returned to work and then one evening a short while later died of a massive coronary heart attack. The doctors somewhat weakly said that 'other vessels in his heart must have been taking up some of the work-load and thus disguising his symptoms'. Cold comfort to the mans family I'm afraid.
My point in recounting these sad tales is important. Medicine is not magic. Make no mistake there is far, far more that doctors do not know about what goes on inside us than what they do. But here is the thing you have to remember - doctors are trying their best. They are doing what they have been taught - and are often fooled themselves by their own press. They have allowed this image of themselves as infalable beings to be built up in the public mind and have done nothing to stop it. They have flown high on borrowed wings and it is no suprise that often do they take a fall. And one final thing; medicine may when all is said and done be pretty weak - but it's the best we've got!
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