Name your poison

PERSONAL COLUMN KENNETH ALLSOP

Like a lapsed Catholic, I shall probably in the evening of my life return to my faith and as a mark of absolution shall receive the Eucharist. It will be bread the colour and texture of oak bark, made—knitted, almost—from compost- grown, stone-ground, wholewheat flour; a lightly boiled brown egg from a free-range hen; lettuce untarnished by chemical sprays; and honey from hives whose bees aren't sugar-syrup junkies and which suck blossom not inflated into fluorescent tumours by hormone shots.

In those last, munching, hours I shall try to bring my intestines back into a state of grace.

With not a digestive moment toirlose, I shall at least try to make token spiritual recompense for my stomach's lifetime subjection to an impious diet.... All that agglomerate sin of chips deep- fried in the grease vats of hell, all those years of diabolical meddling with eclairs. The chocolate has stained right through. to my soul, but I might at that eleventh hour be able to put myself right with God and the Soil Association.

In the meantime I suppose I shall continue my erratic laxity, a sort of gastronomical promis-

cuity—but not without anguish, remorse and

guilt. There are times when I could throw up at the sight of that piece of pheasant breast ascend- ing to my mouth on a fork lifted by my own hand: a self-inflicted wound. Even oftener, I have to force myself through a BBC canteen `steak' pie, not because of the strange texture, impacted like tarmac and hoggin, and pounded into its shape with the flat side of a shovel, but simply because the contents are meat.

I have been a theoretical vegetarian since schooldays, when I was introduced to George Bernard Shaw; when raw carrots, Benthamite rationality and tweed knickerbockers fused in a muddled way with my romantic pantheism, my kleptomania for birds' eggs and my amateur falconry. But I would have found it daunting to argue logically why a passionate love for hawks and owls—killers and flesh-eaters incarnate— should have led me to reject both the execution of animals and the consumption of their barbe- cued corpses.

Roughly speaking, a stern stand on salads seemed to go with my boyhood dream of being

Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies and Henry

Williamson blended into one gem-like flame, a lean, wind-tanned poet striding in ecstatic tor- ment across wild heaths and headlands, wanting for companions only the linnets in the furze and the hunting kestrel, and sustained in my mystical vagabondage by a pocketful of cheese, nuts, lettuce, and an illicit Mars bar.

The point is that I really do care deeply-about the nutritional mistreatment that the human race increasingly perpetrates upon itself—on the one side the unfed and the half-fed, on the other the trashily fed and the over-fed. It appals me that, under pressures of repeated cutting of cereal Prices by successive governments, Britain is sliding, almost unnoticed, out of its traditional crop-rotation into intensive monoculture—the kind of over-cropping that created America's Dust Bowl, and which caused speakers at the last Oxford Farming Conference to express alarm at the imminence of a breakdown in Soil fertility and one farmer to describe our land as 'worse than at any other time in its history.'

It disturbs me that detergents are fed to chickens to make them oven-ready (or inciner- ator-ready?) in six weeks. It worries me (and the British Medical Journal, too, come to that) that the wretched denatured creatures in our livestock Dachaus are forcibly fattened with antibiotics and sex-hormones, which—it could take another generation to be sure—may be turning human males into eunuchs and perform- ing mass female sterilisation. It concerns me that, despite sporadic analytical surveys, we simply don't know how much harm is being done by the intake of toxic pesticides—DDT, heptachlor and lindane which accumulate in the body fat—via drinking water and direct from vegetables and meat.

So, while continuing to swallow my daily benzyl chloride, sulphur dioxide, potassium bromate, and the rest of the laboratory synthe- tics hot from the test-tube, camouflaged as wholesome grub, I stay fairly permanently enraged, worried, concerned, disturbed and out- raged by the high probability that the answer to Elspeth Huxley's question in Brave New Vic- tuals, 'Is the world being contaminated'?' is 'Yes, it is,' and that 'Name your poison' is no longer a joke invitation to a drink but might well be the formalised greeting of any restaurant waiter.

Now, of course, I understand, even without touching much on the world problem of the teeming unfed and half-fed, that to support the industrial urban societies of the twentieth cen- tury food must be mass produced, mechanically reared, sprayed and slaughtered, scientifically stimulated, and canned, tenderised, frozen, de- hydrated and, for all I know, bombarded with gamma rays and sliced by laser beam. I hate the strip-lit, dynamo-humming penitentiaries where broilers and calves, doped and dropsical, are precipitated from mother's womb to human stomach without a sniff of the fall-out beyond their air-conditioned cells. But better that than a return to the stale bread and jam subsistence of the prewar working population, when a chicken was a fairy story luxury—if that is the alternative.

Of course it isn't. There is no need for factory farming to be not only dehumanised but de- animalised as well. Nor am I of a mind to condemn insecticides as such, for they have

transformed food in both quality and quantity. It is slaphappy squirting by the injudicious or conscienceless which has, in some areas, caused ecological damage, through plant to insect to bird and perhaps to human, that is so far immeasurable. (I can't believe that a field of young wheat scattered with dead rooks, finches, hares and foxes symbolises man's cor- rect relationship with the earth.) Furthermore, I cannot bring myself to call for meals purged of all chemicals, if only for the awkward fact that all food consists of chemicals, and but for the use of additives all processed provender would be colourless and tasteless, salt would be gummily immovable from its packet, and Vitamin D would vanish from babies' clinic dried milk.

Nevertheless, there is too much official shifti- ness and blandness in response to public unease.

The two-year survey of fruit, fish, dairy pro- ducts, vegetables and meat begun last August by 200 local authorities will, I hope, establish just how threatening (or not) is the normal level of toxic chemicals. It is likely to be more depend- able, I feel, than the sort of statement issued at the time by the Ministry of Agriculture: 'We have no real reason to think there is cause for alarm in the residues we are finding.' As for the scientist who justified cramming those chickens with detergents by the argument that everyone scoffs detergents anyway, from dishes not properly rinsed after washing-up, I would put him on a rigid diet of Tide.

So—rather wistfully—I accept that there is no realistic alternative of every man his own plot

where all is organic and rich with strawyard manure, and the breakfast muesli is made from Garden of Eden fruits.

But the squalid truth about me is that that is not my honest reason for trimming on this issue.

Greed is my undoing. It is not that I am a cordon bleu head, taking a daily trip in some St James's or Soho den for voluptuaries of the

belly. I'll grab the snails or coq au yin as quick as anyone if I happen to be in that style of place, but I don't have strong emotions about delicate dishes and I can never remember the particular wine you're supposed to remember.

In any case, most of my meals are transit tuck-ins in pubs between Fleet Street and Lime

Grove, and inevitably they drop below the minimum gourmet plimsoll line into the bilge water and ballast of draught bitter, sausages gnarled and hard as fossils, veal and ham pie of that curious clammy consistency which has the effect of novocaine upon the teeth and gums, shepherd's pie heaving in stained pans upon the hot plate, Scotch eggs with crepey crust and a greeny-white hardboiled centre like the eye of an octopus, and white bread sandwiches like folds of damp Kleenex.

In occasional revolt against this uneven fare I resolve to mend my ways and return to the green, green grass of home, to rid myself of that puffy, paunchy feeling. So I begin again deliberately heading for Cranks in Carnaby Street, or the Vega off Leicester Square, or Harrod's Health Bar, and I browse in Whole- food on Baker Street among the yeast extract, low-calorie fruit bars, Zimbabwe yoghourt and Tahin sandwich paste made from an East Indian hairy herb.

For a week or two, even for some months, I can stay straightened out. I feel taller, harder, alert and crisp as a cos lettuce. Then, like a recidivist addict who deludedly thinks he can handle it, the day comes when with foolhardy over-confidence I take a pastry from a trolley, and I am hooked again, back on the downward spiral of ever bigger shots of pasta and pork chops and crêpes suzette—morale and self- respect crumble together in one avalanche that settles in a slag-heap under my belt. I look as gross outwardly as I feel shabby within.

But there is a profounder complication. What causes me to hit the carbohydrates again is not merely character-feebleness; nor even the physical effort of going miles out my way to a vegetarian snuggery. It is the sudden realisation one day as I am ploughing sluggishly through a heap of salad that I am literally fed up—bored and jaded—with lentils and grated cheese and cress. At that moment I know that I never really fancied the wet vapidness of a tomato, sprayed or unsprayed, and I want my palate to tingle again with coarse meats and hot packet gravies and pastry thick with sugar. I have a Baude- lairian lust to touch bottom, I want liP sauce on a Cornish. pasty.

I know it's wrong but I like it. Perhaps the priest—or psychoanalyst—at my bedside when oblivion is nigh will understand the conflict.