Because much may be learned about a civilization by what its people eat, it may be useful to look at ourselves through our own dining habits. Let us start with bread, the great staple of our diet. First, because many of us have forgotten what bread is supposed to be, we have to differentiate between real bread and the stuff we actually eat. Real bread is a solid and crusty substance with an aroma that evokes visions of farm kitchens, flour mills, sacks of wheat and rolling, waving fields of golden grain.

Few people, especially those who live in the large cities of the world have such associations, because most of the bread sold today does not suggest them. Most commercially produced bread is composed of a virtually weightless compound of squishy and porous pith that has been injected with preservatives and allegedly nutritive chemicals. It is not so much white as it is ideally and perfectly colorless. It approximates, as nearly as human genius can manage it, the taste of nothingness. It is a collection of air bubbles, each contained in a film of edible plastic which has been synthesized from wheat or rye. In contact with liquid, whether gravy or saliva, this plastic film disintegrates into a cloying and textureless paste, something like the revolting pap which is fed to babies and which most babies, quite understandably, spit back into their spoons.

To begin with, most wheat is grown abroad by multinational industrial conglomerates. Over millions of featureless acres in such places as Kansas and Nebraska, a perpetual flock of airplanes fly over the fields, spraying our future staff of life with such niceties as Flit and Bugdeath. It is then shaved off the face of the earth with huge mechanical clippers, winnowed and ground into flour which, by washing with detergents and stewing in disinfectants, is then converted into tons of something resembling pancake makeup. Later in the process, to add insult to injury, this stuff is chemically treated to prevent the development of fungus. It is then stored until some convenient time in the future when, in more-or-less automated factories, these mountains of dust are mixed with pantothenic acid, pyridoxine, para-aminobenzoic acid and artificial flavourings. In many cases, because this mass is so far from anything we normally consider part of the food-chain, it is enriched with vitamins and minerals. At that point carbon dioxide is bubbled through the mass. Finally, it is baked. The most remarkable thing is that we then eat this stuff. And, even though we find that it has no flavour or aroma, we are content because we think it is good for us.

The odd thing is that it really is good for us. The proof is that the companies that manufacture this tasteless fare call in chemists and dieticians (but never chefs or gourmets) to test their products. And lo and behold, they report that their miserable creations are indeed "rich in vitamins and nutritious materials". These forced and faked-up products actually do contain the proper amount of proteins, carbohydrates, minerals and vitamins.

This is where the real problem comes in: we have been convinced that the proof of the pudding is in the chemical analysis, not in the eating. Which is not much different than judging the worth of a Debussy prelude in terms of decibels and wave frequencies. Certainly it is good for us. The more important question, the one everyone seems terrified to ask, is "is it good?"

Things that are good are things that are beautiful. They add joy to life. Things that are good, whether an opera or an oil painting or a slice of bread are things that can be savored, and afterwards can be remembered with pleasure. Things that are good make life worth living. They make pain more bearable and beauty more intense. Things that are good go a long way toward elevating life to an art form.

Bread is not the only culprit. Most of what we eat is equally good for us and equally unpalatable. Slices of overdone and warmed-over beef that have suffered in the electronic purgatory of a microwave oven, and which have then been coated with a gravy made of water, library paste and bouillon cubes contain all of the nutrients we need. They simply taste terrible. TV dinners, instant coffee, and peas and carrots that have been frozen, thawed and then boiled to death are not meals. They are punishments. Frozen pies come in containers with beautiful photographs. The actual pies resemble (and taste like) little more than sickening slabs of beige goo that have been flavored with artificial maple syrup and topped with sweetened chemicals that have been squirted from an aerosol bomb.

So easily are we convinced, that even in restaurants, places we go to relax and celebrate the good life, we are beginning to fall into the trap of eating menus instead of diners. In one restaurant I recently found the following description of one of their dishes:

Finest Fresh Dan River Trout Fillets, gently sauteed in breadcrumbs to a golden brown, with fresh garden peas simmered in butter, light and crisp French-fried potatoes, and a lemon wedge

There was even a photograph to whet the appetite for the dismal anticlimax of the reality. The fresh trout fillets were two severe rectangles of some off-white frozen substance that rattled when they hit the skillet. The fresh peas came out of a freezer bag; the butter had so little fat content that it should not legally be entitled to to be called by that name; the chips were made out of potatoes which had been boiled, mashed and reconstituted before being fried. With the exception of the lemon wedge, which was real, this meal, like the menu, was abstract food instead of real food.

By saying that such things are good for us we are implying that they will help us live longer. After all, the doctors and dieticians have told us so. But in the name of what is good for us, we are looking forward to a terrible future. Imagine, if you will, four score and ten years of meals that resemble the warmed over nastinesses served on airplanes and that look and taste like the plastic trays on which they have been served. Is this really a valid reason to live long lives?

© Daniel Rogov