Thursday 30 August 2012

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!

No comments:

Post a Comment