Paradoxically, the richer we get, the worse our food becomes. At its simplest level, the breads and beers available to us today have not the quality of those they have replaced. Both have become triumphs of marketing over substance, image over reality.
Take the company Cuisine de France, which is to authentic French cuisine what Piat d'Or is to a good claret. Its baguettes sometimes have that je ne sais quoi which suggests they could be used as baseball bats. Their outer casings are hard without being crusty, rather like rubber truncheons, and the inner cores seem to be composed of aerated chewinggum. Trapeze artists who suspend their loved ones from their teeth a hundred feet above the ground could strengthen their jaws on Cuisine de France bread. Its success, even in supermarkets that do not supply circuses, is not so much based on its edibility, texture or taste, but on meretricious marketing and a general perception of freshness.
Image and taste
The result has been to drive crustier, tastier but less heavily promoted breads off the shelves. Image wins over taste, as Guinness also seems set on proving. We know what Guinness wants. Its ambition is to transform the traditional stout into a black lager for dotcoms. It is not merely by abandoning real flavour, which is what invariably happens when you cool any beer down to the temperature of a walrus's bellybutton, but it is also abandoning the distinctive Guinness advertising culture.
This was always based on an acute advertising literacy. Guinness advertisements were based on the concept of a community with shared values, and were a triumph of semiotic economy and private humour, going back decades. From the British toucan ads of over half-a-century ago, to the brilliant black-and-white ads of the 1990s, Guinness was promoted by a series of secret signals based on a cultural kinship between producer and consumer. The latest generation of Guinness advertisements appeal to no such common lore: they are a straightforward Americanisation of the entire Guinness culture. They reach out to those who would otherwise be drinking the tasteless, colourless, image-rich lagers. Guinness has decided that the values of traditional stout-drinkers are unimportant compared with the values (whatever they might be) of the dot.com generation. So be it. If Guinness wants its traditional customers to turn elsewhere for stout, I am more than happy to oblige. But how long before the idiocy competition engulfs alternative suppliers of stout? Where does one get a reasonable pint of stout when the nightmare begins, and iced black lager - drunk directly out of bottles, dear God - is everywhere?
But of course the sins of Cuisine de France and St James's Gate are small enough in the grander scale of things; they certainly do not compare with the monstrosities of what the beef industry was getting up to, both here and in Britain, in the 1980s.
Infected animals
No outsider could possibly have believed at the time what farmers and the animal feeds industry were up to, repeatedly recycling infected animal tissue as food for herbivores. There is even one theory that BSE began within the British beef herd after cattle were given poultry droppings which had been turned into cattle feed. Infected animals were then consumed by their peers, and beef cattle became breeding experiments in new and excitingly lethal viruses. Nothing like a touch of cannibalism to put pounds on your heifer, even if she does begin to wobble a bit as she gets to mart.
This contamination did not occur in a single lifespan, but over generations. It is hardly coincidental that two great viral assaults on human life, AIDS and BSE, came from a studied violation of nature. But AIDs kills first time around; BSE was able to spread through the beef community, constantly being recycled through cannibalism so that the prion proteins mutated until finally they were able to infect humans with a deadly form of vCJV. Even now, it is not illegal in Britain to feed blood, gelatin and tallow to pigs or to poultry. Is it possible that vCJD is still a threat to us through the imported grease-and-protein porridge of mechanically recovered meat, which, retextured, reshaped and reflavoured, and put in a pie or curry or stew imported from Britain - and we import a lot - can masquerade as almost anything?
Processed meat
Certainly our own beef industry was guilty of an appalling contempt for both the consumer and for nature, but what happened in Britain was far, far worse. There could still be a strong argument in favour in banning all processed meat products from Britain until we can be sure that the BSE threat to its livestock - to sheep, pigs, poultry and beef - is eliminated. Yet this is virtually impossible, not least because such a ban must have a legal basis. This must in turn be based on scientific knowledge, otherwise government policy will invariably depend on whatever panic is in vogue.
So perhaps we can do no more to protect ourselves or our cattle against the dangers of contaminated beef. Maybe our focus should shift away from that drama to the less life-threatening fate which is consuming our beers and breads. They are being seized, transformed and ruined by image-obsessed marketing people who have no regard for either taste or tradition. Before you can say Cuisine de St James's Gate, we might lose them both for all time. Time for a consumer rebellion.