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-andtonic or selling a vinaigrette without vinegar. A basic sausage has only two main ingredients: lean pork and fat pork in proportions around two-thirds, onethird. 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.
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