What one must conclude is that their products, without additives, are unpalatably bitter, and at present, they need substantial additives before anyone could eat or drink them. As described, this is being presented as a step towards healthier food by reducing unhealthy masking additives. But the question it makes one ask is, why are these additives there in the first place?Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods and Solae, a soy-foods concern, are among the companies showing an interest in this new technology. I read this twice before quite understanding the point being made, or indeed appreciating what the situation with mass-produced food actually is. As reported in the papers, the food industry is exploring ways in which molecular compounds could be added to food to suppress the tongue's response to bitter flavours.
It is not much like the roast chicken and tomato salad that mass production would prefer to offer you The point is, that it is not a luxury product. It is just the food that everyone buys.The scientific breakthrough of the week sounds so revolting and so obviously a bad idea - bad to the point of immorality, frankly - that it is hardly worth giving it any extensive consideration. The chicken looks as if it has had some kind of life, not spent its existence in the dark like a mushroom, soaking up artificial proteins; its breast will be smaller, its legs bigger, and it looks like a dead animal, not some sort of vegetable. The tomatoes are irregular, bulging unpredictably and often still streaked with green; there will be a choice of half a dozen or a dozen different varieties, some better raw, some meant for swift or lengthy cooking.And when you eat them, the meat's sinews will resist under the knife, not give way like tofu; the tomatoes will have a strong, muscly flavour with a pungent edge of slight bitterness, perfectly set off by a rich oil with a specific flavour deriving from a particular stretch of Italian soil. The logic is unfaultable, since if you inflict this awful stuff on consumers for long enough, many of them will actually come to prefer it anyway.I am writing this in Florence, where you don't have to go to specialist butchers and greengrocers to be reminded what food is actually like.
If you want chicken for dinner, or tomatoes for a salad, you just go to the mercato centrale, where everyone shops, and buy the stuff. They are both extremely cheap, but both taste of nothing at all; the triumph of applied thought, when directed not towards the consumer, but towards the convenience of the producer. One hardly needs to think of real scandals in this area; there is nothing more telling than two really frightful inventions, the tasteless Dutch tomato and the tasteless, mass-produced chicken. Science, properly regarded, is an enormous boon to food production, and in the developed world, has provided high quality produce at reasonable cost to a vast and appreciative market.Nevertheless, any suggestion of a scientific breakthrough when it comes to food tends to arouse the greatest suspicion among those, namely us, who have to eat the damned stuff, and it's not unfair to mention a few cases where intense scientific labour has resulted in produce significantly worse than what we were eating before, which mysteriously attains the status of luxury goods. Scientists may well be justified in thinking this rather unfair, at best, or blinkered at worst. The combination of scientific development and food tends to create a feeling of mild alarm in otherwise rational people, long before they have examined the specific merits of the development.
What we need to understand about Arab society is not so much what it was but how it is changing.a.hamilton independent.co.uk More from Adrian Hamilton. There is nothing in Arab culture or achievements that gives the West the right to look down on them.But he and the Arabists who have succeeded him are wrong to see that culture only in terms of a nostalgia for simpler ways. But the basic desire for economic prosperity and a say in your future are no different there than here. Only the mosque is nearest to providing it, not the ballot box Wilfred Thesiger and his fellow explorers were right. The West has always come to the region not bearing the gift of self-determination, but a fistful of weapons in one hand and an oil contract in the other.Iraq to most Arabs is likely to prove no exception. The problem for most Arabs is that the solutions offered by the West have all too often proved to be merely self-serving support for repressive regimes.
