Should we spend all our time worrying about what’s in our food or enjoying a balanced life?

HOW much attention do you pay to the detail of your daily life? As you clamber out of bed in the morning and make your way blearily to the bathroom, do you examine the water coming out of the tap closely for signs of contamination or do you trust the water company to get it right for one more day? Do you examine the stitching of your underclothes or bank on it holding together knowing that if it gives way at least it’s happening under your clothes?

Do you always check the oil in your car engine, fill up the windscreen washer water bottle and check for stone chips in the paintwork before leaving the house? Or do you, like the vast majority of the rest of the population, use a modicum of common sense and get through life without becoming completely obsessive?

Because if we’re to believe certain quarters, those often referred to as food fascists, we should be measuring and analysing and testing our food before even daring to put it anywhere near our mouths.

I happened to catch some daytime TV recently and a programme about whether we knew what was in the food we were eating. Ironically I was in a trendy coffee bar and was made to feel guilty until I started rationalising. On this programme they carried out an experiment by getting an extremely health conscious young lady, at the peak of her fitness, to eat nothing but junk food for nine days – including burgers, kebabs, pizza, a Chinese meal, coffee shop cakes – and then checked to see how she felt. Surprise, surprise, it hadn’t done her much good. However, what they really missed was asking her about the state of her taste buds and the quality of her life due to missing out on so much variety.

Somehow, this seemed to be researching the blinking obvious. Eat nothing but beef burgers and it’s your life that’s not balanced, never mind your diet. You’re obviously missing out on some of the better but readily available pleasures in life. You don’t need to read some patronising information on the side of the carton to know that you really could do with a little fruit and veg every now and then. But then again, if you do actually need to be told, you’re possibly past hope anyway.

It gives us a dilemma if, as seems possible, we have to list quantities of certain parts of our food.. We know exactly what goes into the food that we serve to our customers. We even have a fair bit of knowledge about what a lot of our food was raised on, by whom, what chemicals might have been near it and what the animal was called. But we’d find it extremely difficult to tell you exactly how much salt or fat or sugar was in each and every dish we serve.

Take salt for instance. The actual taste of the finished dish depends on a number of factors but not least the quality of the raw materials and this can sometimes be enhanced by the addition of salt – or sugar or honey or lemon juice and so on. But it’s worth noting that fresh food has a natural level of salt within it already and the only way you can be sure of getting the final taste right is by tasting, because the requirement could be different every time.

And if the basic ingredients are not quite so top-notch – as is possibly the case with much so called junk food – salt, sugar and other flavour enhancers are all required in an attempt to make the dishes interesting. And as a result, so often to my taste, that’s all I can taste. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like all of that type of food. Sometimes it’s all that will do.

Can you really be bothered going through life examining every bit of food you buy and eat and adding its contents to the growing list that you’d obviously have to carry around with you? Somehow the real reason for eating prepared food – enjoyment – would completely disappear. And life wouldn’t be anywhere near so worth living, never mind balanced.