I bought Tamzin a new camera (IXUS 700) because her Sureshot S45 was a bit too large to carry around. The Canon digitals' have a neat feature called "StitchAssist". This makes creating a multi-shot panorama easier by presenting a portion of the previous image in the viewfinder to simplify alignment.
I had honestly thought that my taste buds must be wearing out, since food just doesn't taste how I remember it tasting as a child. But growing the odd vegetable at home, combined with a recent trip to France has actually reinforced the truth - vegetables just don't taste like they used to.
And now a slew of programs on television are concentrating on this fact, and just how bad British food is. Tonight I watched the second part of the Dispatches "Supermarket Secrets" program, and finally we get the explanation: it's not exactly the supermarkets' fault, they attempt to maximise profit by determining what people will buy. The real cause : British consumers don't know how to buy food - going for looks over taste.
It's not clear why this has happened. It is possible that we have never cared much about food and it's taste, but the development of technology, intensive production and the centralising power of the supermarkets have taken this to the logical conclusion - tasteless, cosmetically perfect food, produced with the aid of high doses of pesticides and computerised sorting that wastes upto 30% of production.
So my recommendation is to set aside a small portion of your garden, or even the odd plant pot, and grow a handful of vegetables yourself. This way you will discover that they come in strange shapes and sizes,
but they all have far more taste. This carrot, freshly pulled, could be smelt from the other side of the room. Scrubbed clean, it can be eaten raw with the skin left on (since we grew it ourselves, we know that no chemicals were applied). Fantastic !
Re-educate your palate - and start to demand Real Food.
PS: What's a real pity is that large industry lobbying power may force France and other EU countries down the same path, all in the name of "efficiency".
