John Whiting

There's a small gleam of hope. Tim Lang, one of real food's most ardent champions, is now allowed to play the Prophet Jeremiah in the echoing halls of power. I've known Tim for years, ever since his days with the London Food Commission. Unlike so many campaigners, he's passionate not just about food politics but about food itself.

Some further unhappy thoughts from George Monbiot on the demise of British produce.

Because we're all insane!

Le Matolote sounds promising. For me, "bad service" means bringing the wrong food after it's got cold.

You caught it! (signed) a whiting

Your luck seems to have been better than my own. I found it virtually a Disneyland experience, crowded with ignorant punters. One of our party had the coq au vin, another the boeuf bourguignonne. They were both served in an identical murkey sauce of dubious provenance; the meats had obviously been (over)cooked separately and at too high a heat, then dumped into the black sludge to keep warm. I've had better from frozen packets.

I've never observed a problem with children in a French restaurant. Sunday lunch in the provences is traditionally a family affair at which you regularly see three generations, or even four.

You want it your way

It is encouraging that, in spite of the encroachment of cheap clothing and knick-knack stalls, these genuine food markets still function all over Paris (and elsewhere). By the nature of their produce, they must be kept alive by the local residents, not by the sight-seeing tourists.

In France, difficult to place the "U", inasmuch as until fairly recently an alcoholic was officially defined as someone who averaged more than three litres of wine a day.

I spent almost ten years working as an archivist and librarian in various capacities. As a protest, I vowed to write my MA thesis entirely out of sources in my own collection. I succeeded.

And I've known debtors who had neither the principle to pay the interest nor the interest to pay the principal.

Unless your concern is with medical history, I wouldn't worry too much about finding those original articles. They were played for drama, and medical opinion has changed more than once since then.

Aw, just when it was getting interesting. . .

I'm sure that most of those posting to this list have a starrier experience than my own. I should say in all honesty that if I could afford it, I'd go back to l'Arpege for another menu degustation -- and another, and another. My choices are based not so much on abstract principle as on the lack of principle in my bank account.

I think there's a very good reason why Jeffrey Steingarten has focussed his attention in Paris on modern bistrots rather than the maccarooned monsters. The fact that the famous chefs of Paris are increasingly focussing their attention on opening bistros of their own (whatever they choose to call them) is not just a sign of hard times, but an accomodation to the fact that many Parisians are now more interested in everyday excellence than in gob-smacking extravagance. Does that sound dogmatic? It merely describes what is actually happening. And I believe that the motivation is not merely a greedy desire to make more money, or even just to survive, but the recognition of a changing scale of values and even a new enthusiasm. Taillevent and its fellows do indeed perpetuate a great tradition, but it's not unlike the Mona Lisas and the Venus de Milos in the Louvre -- except that in the Louvre you can pay a small sum to look at them rather than a fortune to purchase them. What does all this mean to you? My advice is, spread the money around and learn what Paris is today rather than what it was in the fading past.

It was Tom Lehrer: "When Mozart was my age he'd been dead for three years." I prefer to think of Verdi. When he was my age, he was just warming up.

Greed, buddy, sheer greed! And curiosity. And a suspicion that I might get an article out of it without killing myself.

My guess is that they consider the risk of food poisoning to be so unacceptable that they will do anything to protect themselves, even if it destroys the flavor. I can verify that the only harm that came to me from those miserable specimens was to my psyche.

There is a tale that a French monk with extravagant gastronomic tastes was sent as punishment to an English monastery. His worst fears were realized. He wrote home in complaint (and this is how the story is known), ‘Their vegetables? They boil them! And serve them forth with nothing, straight from the water, like hay to horses!’ However, he did discover a wondrous thing that no one had told him about – the English custom of ending dinner with a hot pudding. He wrote about this with great delight and declared that it had made the whole experience worthwhile!

And nerves of steel. I put away plateaux des fruit de mer, steak tartare, raw egg mayonnaise, sashimi . . . But I steer clear of rare chicken and pork. One day it will catch up with me, and my epitaph will read: "Never a sick day in his life, and now this!"

I'm no luminary -- I'm just a cheapskate!

Perhaps supermarket customers have been taught actually to demand the absence of flavor they are usually given. Waitrose does pretty well, and Sainsbury's "taste the difference" has come up with some remarkably good products, but the average supermarket shopper seems to prefer food on a level with commercial TV. I forgot to mention -- the young woman ahead of me at the checkout wheeled away two trollies of packaged foods after laying out over £130 in cash. Maybe she's catering for a gang in hiding.

It's a genuine question on my part and I'm sure on yours -- how do they do it? Are the shellfish irradiated? (I don't think that's legal in Britain.) It must be a unique process, inasmuch as I've never had any other shellfish that was terrible in exactly that way, both flavor and texture. Come to think of it, the shrimp were like the "all you can eat" shrimp my wife and I encountered in a Berlin restaurant years ago. I'm sure they were irradiated. I excaped with only a violent upchuck, but my poor wife got hepatitus-B from them. Irradiation kills the bacteria, but it doesn't remove the poisons produced by them.

Whenever I visit my friend Hugh in Cambridge, I follow the A1’s only soft-porn motorway sign, which points east to Baldock and west to Letchworth. The former is an ancient coaching, malting and brewing town, but the latter is England’s first garden city, dating from only a century ago. Who says that late Victorian city planners didn’t have a sense of humor? In spite of an interest born of living in a garden suburb begun at around the same time, I have yet to visit Letchworth. My route takes me instead through historic Baldock, past the front of an ex-factory so imposing that some of the younger locals are convinced that it was once a movie studio. Its mission, however, was not to pull wool over eyes but nylon over legs. Until Britain’s failing textile trade closed it down in the ’70s, it was the Kayser Bondor factory. The monumental façade was grade II listed, and so when Tesco turned the site into a superstore it had to be preserved. I usually pass it with only a sideways glance, but this time I stopped to top up my tank with Tesco’s cut-price petrol. Crossing the vast Saharan parking lot, almost empty this early evening, I found the temptation to peek inside irresistible. A route march around the back and side of the enormous structure brought me to an entrance leading into the clothing section. I could have been in Wal-Mart. It was a prison warehouse of cheap rags so anonymous and uniform as to suitably clothe an army of criminal mothers and children. Then came shelves of cut-price electronic gear, enough to blast the ghettos of an empire. Finally, the food. In the deli section there was a help-yourself salad bar offering the same alternatives you get in cut-price all-you-can-eat buffets. Next to it was a cheese counter where you could buy in bulk the same blocks of pale soap offered prepacked in late night minimarkets. Scrawny chicken wings in huge packages were going at flyaway prices. And then the PRICED TO CLEAR cabinet caught my eye. Along with a few birds on their last legs, there was a colorful plastic tray enticingly labeled, Poised on the edge of its sell-by date, it was marked down by half to only £3.49. For a seafood guzzler like me, it was irresistible.Two hours later, having whipped up a bowl of aïoli, I was ready to empty the shells. I like to do all the work in advance and then enjoy the contrasting flavors at leisure. The first shrimp’s head separated much too easily. When I pulled away the tiny legs from underneath, part of the inner meat came with them. Its texture was loose and insubstantial, as though it had been removed, chopped and then reinserted. It was difficult to remove the shell and leave anything behind. I tried a langoustine. Their meat is always firm and chewy, but this one was as sloppy as the shrimp; a small child could easily have cut it up with a dull spoon. On to a crab claw – same story. The points came easily and flexibly out of the end, as a fresh crab’s properly should, but the meat clung in small bits to the thin central blade, refusing to come away cleanly even with a sharp knife. Time for a tasting – first the shrimp, then the langoustine, then the crab. Nothing. Zilch. No flavor whatsoever. Unoptimistically I tried a cockle and a muscle. Adead, Adead O! Not stale, not ammoniac, simply neutral. They all tasted as food had tasted to me several years ago when a bad cold left me for months without any oral sensations except salt, sweet and hot. Refusing to accept defeat, I emptied the rest of the shells and put all the meat into a small bowl with a generous dollop of aïoli and another of crème fraîche. At last, real flavor – everything tasted of the rich dressing. But it might as well have been a bowl of minced supermarket chicken breast. So how do they do it? I’ve tasted seafood that was off or unpleasantly strange, but never with such a bland anonymity. It was as though the poor little creatures had swum in the same sea of verbiage that had spewed forth the gobbledygook on the packet. The next time I read a glowing report of a Tesco product, I’ll wonder what sort of fairy dust had been sprinkled on it just before it left the storeroom. ©2004 John Whiting