Helen Martin: Sci-fi tastes are hard to swallow

YOU have to hand it to the creators of early Star Trek episodes. They predicted hand-held mobiles, body scanners and particle transference. My favourite gadget was the replicator. Boldly going where no man had gone before brought severe catering problems. Even the long arm of Tesco couldn't reach Vulcan and Romulus. So James T and the gang keyed in clam chowder or mince and tatties and the good old replicator did its best to approximate the taste using protein molecules and artificial flavo

That too, turns out to be a stunningly accurate prophesy. Despite our self-delusion that we demand fresh, natural food, today's groceries are stuffed so full of artificial chemicals and additives that they drive kids bonkers, hence the call to ban certain colourings. Of course, it stands to reason that if children are affected, we all are. It's just that the effect on little Johnny is particularly noticeable because he's kicking the cat, strangling granny and swinging on the curtains.

The question really shouldn't be what we should take out of food production but how it ever got in there in the first place.

Those of a certain age will know that before tartrazine (E102) was routinely on the menu, mushy peas were not radioactive green but olive or khaki. And there may have been just a hint of sweetness but nothing like the chemically induced sugary taste they have today.

Likewise, unadulterated smoked haddock is dirty white. It's only the addition of quinoline yellow (E104) that makes it a vivid canary colour.

Most cheeses, left to their own devices, do not turn orange. And surely tinned strawberries are red enough without E129, otherwise known as allura red.

I cannot recall hordes of housewives marching on the Batchelors factory demanding greener mushy peas and I'm absolutely positive shoppers didn't lobby fishmongers for yellow haddock. So who decided to change the colour of our food in the first place? Do brighter colours really make it easier to sell or more attractive to eat?

And colour's only the start. There are preservatives, artificial sweeteners, unnecessary salts. The problem is that we don't really know any more what something is supposed to taste like au natural, and we come to accept food lies as incontrovertible truth – for example, baked beans coming in a red, gloopy sauce or Turkish delight being pink.

That's why older people are always banging on about how food used to taste better. It did – or rather it tasted of what it was supposed to be rather than something that was formulated and spat out of the Enterprise replicator.

I appreciate you all probably have better things to do but an interesting experiment that will entertain your over-E- numbered, hyperactive children is to buy harmless, natural, vegetable colouring and surprise them with blue potatoes, purple carrots and green chicken . . . just to prove that colour isn't everything.

Then it's a short step to making your own baked beans with the seasoning of your choice, whereupon you will discover that, depending on what you cook them with, they will be beige, or yellow or interspersed with bits of tomato but not bubbling in a blood-red sugary paste.

The Food Standards Agency can pressurise manufacturers to remove additives until they are blue in the face (E131 or "Patent Blue V" ought to do the trick). But unless consumers stop expecting food the colour of primary poster paints, try cooking the real thing and start demanding chemical-free food from supermarkets, we are destined to go where only Mr Spock, Dr McCoy and the rest of the crew have gone before – smacking our lips over a vague approximation of real food created in a laboratory rather than a kitchen.

Spick and span
SCIENTISTS have discovered that just 20 minutes of housework a week is enough to boost mental health. They put this down to the benefits of physical exercise. I beg to differ. Housework predominantly affects the mind.

There is something pleasing about being in a clean, ordered house and something morbidly depressing about a messy, dirty, cluttered home. There is even a sense of satisfaction when the carpets are spotless and everything smells of polish – whether you personally did it or not.

It's also a matter of how you view the task in hand. I don't exaggerate when I say that when I worked full-time, housework was like a leisure activity; something I did on my time off and really enjoyed.

Working from home, with all the hours in the day to tackle the ironing or mop the kitchen floor – and crucially, no excuse to avoid either – it has somehow lost its appeal.

One thing I can state definitively, though. Scientists know very little about housework – otherwise they'd realise that doing just 20 minutes a week is about as frustrating and ineffective and likely to cause mental breakdown as trying to row the Atlantic with a fish slice.