Flavours to die for
Is there anything left on the menu that we can enjoy without feeling guilty? It all began with fat especially animal fat. A hundred years ago farmers bred pigs with four inches of fat on them. People cooked with lard, used it like butter, made cakes with it. They ate it for the high calorific value and smeared on their children before putting a vest on them for the winter. Now we hear the dread word ‘cholesterol’ and we can’t eat butter or lard or any fatty foods, and if the cholesterol doesn’t get you obesity will.
Sugar was given the next drubbing and became public enemy number two – sweets, sticky cakes, fizzy drinks. You weren’t safe; there was hidden sugar in baked beans, sauces and ketchup. Salt in snacks would harden your arteries as a parting shot after cholesterol had clogged them up.
E numbers came and went because they scared the hell out of everyone and were then replaced with their proper names, some of which were so long you needed an English degree to pronounce them and a Science degree to understand them.
The press, (and it’s always the press because they like to put the wind up old people), having exhausted all the scare stories they could extract from ingredients, turned to methods of cooking, methods that covered just about everything we eat – think toast, crisp fried potatoes, the crispy bits on the outside of the Sunday roast joint, deep fried battered fish. I could go on; the enemy this time is acrylamide – a substance that is in anything that is roasted, fried or baked so that means even crusty bread. I sentence you to a lifetime of boiled food – depressing isn’t it?
Hey-ho, we have to die of something so shave a few years off my life so I can still indulge and I will live with that.