Cake

Everything we eat these days is basically cake.

No, I mean it - think about the ingredients you'd find in a packet cake mix from the fifties. Tada! That's the contents of most of the things in your pantry. And your fridge and freezer.

Okay, how good is your kitchen know-how? What are the basic ingredients of any stock-standard cake? Flour, milk, sugar, shortening and a pinch of salt. Eggs are nice, but you don't really need them.

Sausages are made of flour, milk, sugar, shortening and salt. So are chips/crisps with flavouring. That packet of pasta and sauce you were going to use with your steak tonight? Flour, milk, sugar, shortening and salt. That tin of condensed tomato soup? Flour, milk, sugar, shortening and salt.

The spaghetti you ate last night? Flour, milk, sugar, shortening and salt. The can of bolognese sauce you had with it? Flour, milk, sugar, shortening and salt.

It's all cake, my friends. It's just spaghetti bolognese flavoured cake.

Okay, sure, technically fruit isn't cake. But those "fruit bars" you buy in boxes of plastic wrapped portions? Those are cake. And maybe that piece of steak isn't cake - but those meatballs definitely are.

Oh, and those "breakfast shakes" they have for people who are too busy to eat cereal? Liquid cake. Speaking of cereal, most of that is cake, too.

"How can we avoid eating cake for every single meal?" I hear you ask, although I don't know why you bothered because we all know you don't care. I mean, heck, it's food. People are happiest when they are completely ignorant of what they're actually putting in their mouths.

No one says, "My, this hamburger is delicious - what's in the patty? Oh, and while we're at it, what's this bun made of?"*

The answers to such questions are not for the vast majority of you petty, squeamish humans who, for some reason, can happily eat any given food-stuff for years up until someone actually tells you what's in it. Then, suddenly, it's all "Oh, I can't eat that! It contains parts of animals I would rather pretend didn't exist!"

Well, get over it. And get over the cake thing, too.

The alternative is to make the food yourself. You know, start with the ingredients and mix them together? People used to do that, once. Back when they would know exactly what they put in their mouths, and were perfectly okay with that.

Of course, that's actually not a guarantee that you won't be eating cake for every meal. A lot of these things always were cake. Take sausages, for example. The basic pork sausage recipe your great-grandmother used involved flour, milk, sugar, shortening, salt, blood and assorted minced bits of whatever-was-left-of-the-pig. Possibly some whatever-was-left-of-the-cow as well. Heck, if they were short on pig bits, they probably just used the blood. And, depending on where they came from and what they could afford, maybe not the sugar. But still, sausage has always been animal flavoured cake (squeezed into something's intestines). Good stuff.

So really, once you start making your own food, you'll probably find yourself making a fair bit of cake-like things anyway.

So what's the problem?

Well, I guess the real problem isn't that we're eating so much cake, but that we're eating so much bad cake. Manufacturers really don't care what they serve you, so long as you don't sue them, so they'll use the cheapest (read: worst) ingredients they can get away with. So, it's not that great, as cake goes.

Plus, something like 150 people made that tin of tuna in seeded mustard mayonnaise** you're eating, and not a single one of them knows you or cares about you in the slightest. Why do you think I used the concept of a packet cake mix from the 1950s? No one quite did "let's just serve them whatever we have lying around" quite like food manufactures in the 50s. Except, maybe, food manufacturers in China ("Hey, you know what would increase our profits? Let's put less milk in the milk and replace it with something that looks white. No one will ever notice...")

Food manufacturers. Pfft. Just another bad idea to come out after the Industrial Revolution.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, cake.

You really need to think of anything you buy ready made as cake. That is, of course, no reason why you shouldn't buy it and eat it, as long as you are okay with the crappy cake-iness of it. But I think it is helpful to be aware of what you're eating, even if you then decide it's not a problem. Plus, it makes you less shocked and alarmed when you discover you have a wheat allergy and everything on the shelves has some kind of flour content. Of course it does - it's cake.

But, the main reason why you should recognise and understand that the bowl of cereal you were thinking of having for breakfast is actually really bad cake is simple: you can make yourself a chocolate cake out of quality ingredients and know that you are actually eating something no worse than the "real food" - in fact, most probably much better!

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, Bill Cosby was right - chocolate cake is a perfectly acceptable breakfast food. Probably just as acceptable for lunch and dinner. It's certainly no worse than half the other stuff you shove into your mouths for these meals.

This knowledge is my gift to you. Enjoy.


*That would be cake, and cake
**Also cake