A self-writing column would make life perfect

Apr 9 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

ROLL up, roll up. Feast your eyes on this – it’s a spectacle worthy of a PT Barnum circus, as perfectly formed as General Tom Thumb, and it could be even more lucrative than the Fiji Mermaid.

You’ve heard of the girl who can squeeze herself inside a knee-high box, now meet the potato that can peel itself.

You can imagine them living in nests, buried deep in the Great British hedgerows – usually timid creatures that only rarely show themselves.

Then they whip off their skin with all the showbiz finesse of Gipsy Rose Lee and the abruptness of a common-or-garden flasher, startling passing ramblers out of their daydreams of flasks of tea and bags of cheese and onion crisps consumed within the shelter of a dry stone wall.

But, no, it turns out they are born without any skin at all – not huddling together in a patch of brambles in primitive costumes made from discarded blackbird feathers, but deliberately grown that way so we humans don’t have to bother getting out the peeler.

Or so the people behind the Real Food Festival would have had us believe. Unfortunately, like many of PT Barnum’s exhibits (the mermaid turned out to be a dead monkey stitched to a fish’s tail), it is a work of fiction.

But April Fools aside, it is surely only a matter of time before someone in this brave new world of colour-coded TV dinners (orange for pretty bad for you, red for book in a triple-bypass) and disposable fashion (where’s the financial justification in dry cleaning a dress that cost you £1.50?), really does invent the no-peel potato.

It’s not like we even have to wash them properly any more – buy straight from a farm shop and you find yourself surprised that there’s still soil attached.

Supermarkets don’t sell vegetable brushes these days. Believe me, I’ve looked, and the nylon-bristled floorbrush my boyfriend bought as an alternative didn’t solve the problem. For dinner that night, we ate carrots that appeared to have been chomped on by a buck-toothed bunny.

I suppose it’s to be expected. Now that even Delia includes tinned mince in her recipes, presumably using the provided ring pull rather than a can-opener to unseal the container, it was only a matter of time before even cooking from fresh was given the fast food treatment.

It’s like being back in fifties America when the “modern family” had dinner parties to show off their new refrigerator to the neighbours.

Instead of hinting Desperate Housewives-style at how many hours they spent soaking the ham or straining the pips out of the raspberry sorbet, today’s hostesses should be boasting about the lack of effort they had to put into the meal.

If nature hadn’t got there first, we’d be inventing oranges that are already divided into segments when you take off the peel, or bananas that are grown in handy wipe-down packages that you remove to reveal the soft flesh beneath.

What about cutting out the preparation process altogether and engineering plants that grow the finished dishes in microwaveable pods?

Visiting a farm would be like stepping into a Roald Dahl book or a mystical land at the top of the Faraway Tree, where you can pick buds filled with strawberry jelly straight from the vine.

Vast orchards, where the tallest branches of the apple crumble trees reach for the clouds, would be carpeted with a thick covering of steamed spinach moss and fried egg daisies.

Even after a 10-hour day in the office, feeding the family would be a doddle with a fishfinger bush in the back garden and a cactus sprouting spaghetti Bolognese in the conservatory.

At parties, guests would be encouraged to sip damson wine from the sap of a thickly-stemmed shrub and pluck canapés and cocktail sausages straight from the vegetation.

Such innovations would certainly solve the busy working mum’s dilemma, but would surely only exacerbate another scourge of modern living – the obese teenager – if they didn’t even have to walk as far as the shops to buy a sherbet dip dab.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk