pumpkinstrokemarrow

So the next point is, if the great French public are tucking into this stuff, can it really be so bad? After all, airlines have poured lots of money into making fancy looking and acceptably tasting meals in the same sort of way. Maybe technology really is moving on. Maybe you really can pop the frozen meal into the microwave, count to a hundred, dispose a few dinky vegetables around the resultant hot goo (this way you can say prepared in our very own kitchen under the guidance of our very own grandmama) and serve. Encourage punter to whack down a bit of vino before he or she tucks in and everybody happy.

Then we suppose, that for practical purposes, that is to say for most people for most of the time, we get an acceptable result this way. What ground does the purist have to stand on? That this is the thin end of the wedge. That people will get used to eating the kind of highly charged, diabetes inducing food that does well in this sort of regime. That food will become subject to the means of cooking it cheap, rather than the other way around. It all sounds a bit thin.

Although it does remain true that it is quite hard to get in a restaurant the sort of vegetables which are quite straightforward to prepare in the home for a small number of people to a relaxed timetable. Also true that the amount of space devoted to real vegetables - swedes, curly cabbages and the like - in Mr. S. is a lot less than that devoted to mushy vegetables. Tasteful organic mix of lettuce leaves from more than one country sort of thing. All washed up and ready to go and entirely suited to vegetarians, coeliacs and vegans.

I am reminded of the regular scandals in the art world when someone passes something off for an ancient masterpiece and which subsequently turns out to have been knocked out by some apprentice in said master's mother-in-law's kitchen. Now what is clearly silly is that the value of the picture nose dives when this last fact hits the ether. The picture - or whatever - has not changed, but our perception of it has changed with our perception of its provenance. Which is, to my mind anyway, largely nonsense. If you cannot decide whether you like a picture by looking at it, should you be looking at pictures at all? Now if you are an highly paid expert in painter A, struggling to form a proper view of painter A in a world historical art perspective, you might reasonably care whether picture B is by painter A or painter C. If the latter, you are not going to devote too much of your valuable time to it. It would not add too much to your, or indeed our, knowledge of painter A and his or her place in the world of art. But the rest of us need not be troubled by such considerations. If you like it stick it, on the wall. That ought to be enough.

And now I find I have burbled myself into a corner where I should not be. There is a role for education. Things that one might not think too much of at first sight, with a bit of trouble and prompting might become an important part of one's life. Firing from the hip does not always - if indeed often - give the best result. Experts are useful. Harking back to the religious theme, we do need priests to show us the way to the Lord. Most of us are not going to find it all by ourselves. I guess the trick is for all of us to remember the limitations of experts of all sorts.