Saffron studies

Recently I enticed my niece to a gastronome’s dinner during the London Food Festival. She is about to enter university, and I thought it was about time she learnt to taste. The evening proved a disaster; after a lengthy discussion of saffron she turned to me and asked, with quiet rage, ‘How can they carry on about an expensive spice when people are starving?’ How young she is, and how deeply am I sunk in the last sensual pleasure remaining to the elderly bourgeois.

In one way of course my niece is quite right. In 40 years, when she is my age, the world will probably be afflicted by food riots which may make the riots in Africa and South America this spring seem tame. By 2050, it’s estimated that the globe’s arable productive land will be cut in half while the population will rise from 6.3 to 9 billion.