Breakfast has been more than usually thrilling at our house since a public relations company lent us a toy in place of the trusty old Dualit two-slice toaster we’ve owned for a decade. “Revolutionary” is a dismally overused word in PR, but this gadget is genuinely new. “It glows!” gasped my son when we turned on Magimix’s see-through toaster for the first time. We peered into the glass panels like Tiny Tims, gawping at the bread as it browned before our eyes. It was a big moment for a family where good toast is seen as a basic human right, and the trill of the smoke alarm is the soundtrack to many breakfasts.
The technology of toast-making has hardly changed since 1909, when the first commercially successful electric toaster was patented by General Electric. This plugged into a light socket and worked by passing a current through high-resistance alloy wires. By 1925 you could buy an automatic pop-up toaster with a timer, which toasted bread on both sides simultaneously.
Three years later, machine-sliced bread went on the market and the toaster’s place in the kitchen was permanent. Few refinements have made it to the market — not even the 2001 prototype which, by accessing the internet while toasting, promised to brand that day’s weather forecast on your slice of bread.
With the rise of the toaster came a sad decline — from a toast-lover’s point of view — in the employment of snivelling small boys with toasting forks. This was the most effective bread-toasting system ever invented, though dependent on open fires and sixth-form swells with sadistic tendencies. What it did, of course, was use a keen human eye to judge the state of the toast, rather than some blind and soulless clockwork timer.
Magimix’s new machine allows both systems. It replaces the side walls with double layers of glass so you can see in. And it heats the toast with hidden quartz rods: hence the coal-fire glow so reminiscent of the fag-master’s study. In fact it’s a sort of toaster-aquarium, as nicely designed as you’d expect from the French company Magimix. There are buttons for defrosting and toasting one side only; the slot will widen to fit a bagel, and a neat crumb tray lets you make cheese toasties without causing rage among other users of the kitchen.
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The chief drawback after the price — £160 — is that for just one slice “Le Toaster Vision” uses nearly twice the wattage of the Dualit. You may need to plant a tree to carbon-offset a week’s average family breakfasts.
Other than that my only objection is that it comes in the same stainless steel and brushed aluminium that every kitchen gadget must wear these days, as though we were all working in biotech laboratories. I would prefer a Vision with porcelain knobs and goldfish between the glass panels. But when the PR company asks for this one back we’re going to pretend we’ve lost it.
YOU’LL have your toast buttered? Or with a little healthy margarine? If you’ve been following the health news this week, you won’t be having either: your toast will be served with some bran husks spread atop it. Actually, you may not have toast at all, since heating bread or any sugar-containing carbohydrate above 120C will drastically increase acrylamide levels, and acrylamide is a very nasty carcinogen. Processed cereals are brimming with acrylamide, too, and so is coffee. Perhaps we’ll just skip breakfast altogether.
It has been a ghastly week for what health policy academics call “the worried well”. A clutch of doctors demanded the outlawing of all trans fats — the basis of cheap margarine and cooking oils — while a London heart surgeon told the BBC that butter should be banned. (Disappointingly, the BBC failed to mention that his thoughts were being publicised by a margarine manufacturer.) As an average male-pattern hypochondriac I’ve long wondered how seriously to take these two interlinked health scares. The argument over trans fats — called hydrogenated vegetable oils (HVOs) on an ingredients list — has been going on for decades. Hydrogenated oils were developed nearly a century ago; they are used by food manufacturers because they behave like processed animal fats, solid when cool but melting at body temperature to give what is known as good “mouth feel”.
But their chief advantage over butter or lard is that they are fantastically cheap — they were first made from discarded cotton seeds and then from whale blubber — and they are as stable, according to campaigners, as plastic.
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Shelf-life of trans fats is normally at least two years, but there’s a famous cupcake that an American campaigner against trans-fat displays on TV talk shows with the claim that it is 22 years old. Useful stuff, trans fats. It wasn’t hard for the food industry to find doctors to call them healthier than butter, too.
And so, generations of children in the 20th century were condemned to suffer sandwiches made with Stork and Echo margarine, and pastry made with Cookeen and its like. Now, of course, we know that traditional margarine made with hydrogenated oils is nutritionally useless and perhaps less healthy for you than the butter it attempted to replace: certainly, trans fats can be more harmful to the body’s tubes than saturated fats.
But that doesn’t mean we should worry about them. At the time of the last trans-fat scare in 2006, food and sweets manufacturers and fast-food chains queued up to announce that they were phasing them out, because technical advances in oils made them unnecessary. This has largely happened: the main British campaign against trans fats declared success in 2007.
The only branded products I could find with HVOs in them this week were a packet of Mr Porky pork scratchings in the pub, and Unilever’s Elmlea imitation cream (and these may not contain the most harmful “partially” hydrogenated oils). But even in 2006, it was clear that no average Briton needed to lose any sleep over trans fats. In fact, unless you ate at least one large deep-fried meal from a takeaway every day of the week, you were safe.
And butter? Banning butter would save 3,500 British lives a year, Dr Shyam Kolvekar told BBC Breakfast. (His remarks were put out by the PR agency for Unilever’s Flora margarine, which nowadays claims to be “virtually trans-fat free”.) Clearly, eating too many saturated fats, or trans fats, means you won’t live as long. But if you’re comfortably off and you eat too many “bad fats”, the statistics say you’ll live longer than a poor person who does the same. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.
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The problem is working out what’s worth worrying about. What’s best to eat for a happy life; butter from a dairy cow or Flora pro.activ from Unilever? Should we ban butter or ban poverty? These are questions to ponder as we sit down to eat our toast, listening, perhaps, to the latest news from Haiti.