Turn out the lite; lite food is insipid, weak, denatured, flat, diluted, and easy: food for cowards and children

National Review, Sept 30, 1996 by Digby Anderson

THE other day I saw something in a shop. It was about four inches long and pink. It called itself a sausage without fat. Despite its size and shape, this is rather like calling something with no gin in it a gin-and-tonic or selling a vinaigrette without vinegar. A basic sausage has only two main ingredients: lean pork and fat pork in proportions around two-thirds, one- third. And the fat is essential: it partially melts under heat, cooking and moisturizing the lean in a special way that makes the sausage taste like a sausage.

The mildest thing one would want to say about this horrid dry pink innovation, which sweated under the grill and fell to bits under the knife, was that it was less than a sausage. Which is precisely what has been happening to food and much else on a grand or rather a pathetic scale. Cigarettes with filter tips are less than cigarettes, and non-alcoholic beer is less than beer. Low-fat milk is less than milk.

There is a word that usefully captures this trend to the insipid and denatured, and it is "Lite." There is now lite wine, lite colas, light olive oil, light bread, light coffee, and light frozen dinners. Go to a restaurant with a modern person and the greatest compliment she will be able to pay as she leaves will be, "That was a wonderful lunch, just what I like, light."

The "Lite" trend has at least one redeeming feature. Over the years I have struggled to find the right word to describe the food I cook and write about. Well, now we know. It is whatever is the opposite of Lite. A pheasant shot and hung for two weeks till ripe, a leg of beef stewed in a heavy Rhone with the wine reduced to a few tablespoons of powerful sauce, the dark meat from crabs pureed down with hot mustard, a bass with its body slit and stuffed with sliced lemon and garlic and half-grilled, half-stewed in pungent Greek olive oil, kidneys in Fino Sherry, a well-cured manchego cheese, old goat crottin, a thimbleful of espresso -- these are the opposite of Lite.

But it is not just a matter of heaviness or strength. The aroma of a saffrony fish soup, the complex tastes of mesclun with a home-made wine vinegar and olive oil, a bone-dry Champagne, brains in the lightest of batters -- none of these are strong. But they have their proper character. That does not mean they are simple. The mesclun is obviously complex, the others less obviously but still so. Good wines are complex. Indeed one characteristic of whatever-is-the-opposite-of-Lite is that it has not been made easy. There are no concessions in a cassoulet.

Good dishes are what they are. If a novice approaches them, it is he who has to submit and learn to appreciate them. They are not altered for him. And whatever-is-the-opposite-of-Lite also has texture. Good eating is about physical sensations: of crunching the tiny bones of pigs' feet, sucking away at the crab claw, pulling that greeny purple as- paragus spear through your teeth, punching the claret round the gums, chewing at that older and better piece of beef, sniffing the sinus-clearing horse-radish, the sharp intake of breath as the marc hits the back of the throat, the drying of the mouth as a sour Asian fish sauce touches the gums, and the sheer delight of using a Spanish wooden toothpick to excavate the gaps in the teeth and enjoy the flecks of almonds or filaments of stewed wild duck a second time around.

If the opposite of Lite is all these things -- pungent, complex, characterful, without concession, food for men -- then this reflects back and throws more light on what Lite is. Lite is insipid, weak, denatured, flat, diluted, and easy: food for cowards and children. Now this is no reproach to those who make Lite products. The food market is demand-led. The industry supplies what people want and does so very efficiently. So booming Lite business gives us a picture of the American and British consumer of food. He is ignorant, timid, squeamish, and childish.

Come to think of it, Lite is quite a good description of the rest of our culture. Our morality is Lite, childish, and diluted. Our religion is insipid and undemanding. The schools make things easy for their pupils. The entertainment industry is fluffy and flimsy. Is a foreigner allowed to suggest that the obvious description of the Republican candidate for the Presidency is not "wrong" but "Lite"?