Presentation of food has always been an area where opinions differ wildly. At one end you have the destructionists who mainly work in company canteens and seem to believe that however neatly it is possible to serve food it should always be splatted violently onto a plate with straggly bits sort of plonked on the main part and a couple of watery vegetables dropped nearby. They've started coming out of canteens and into proper restaurants recently - the rhubarb in the rhubarb crumble at Monte's for example must always dribble over the bowl and if it fails to do so there is spare rhubarb that will be slapped on to give it an authentically haphazard look. At the other end of the scale you have the chefs for whom every course is a precise work of art, a crafted installation that is with great regret served to an unappreciative public who insist on destroying it by putting it in their mouths.

The major triumphs of the canteen school were the discoveries of moussaka and lasagne, which serve their art perfectly, but the Sistine Chefs have had to try a bit harder. Nouvelle Cuisine was where it all started. For the first time control of presentation had passed to the kitchen rather than silver service waiters or tableside flambéers and this meant that at last they had some control. And lo, Tower Presentation was born.

The daddy of tower presentation is probably top chef Richard Neat. Their method starts with a huge white plate, with food in the middle in a tidy concentric tower which collapses into a heap the minute you have to eat it, as if the food is booby-trapped to humiliate anyone with the temerity to try. The theory, one chef has explained to me, is that the flatness of traditional presentation takes away from the theatre of food. So just like our only other experience of form over practicality - Sixties high-rise blocks - it doesn't matter that they're not practical and no one wants them, the public is having them because the people in charge have a theory and want it to be true.

The effort they go to to achieve this effect is amazing. There are metal tubes into which the food is poured and compacted like cement, each layering another part of the meal on top of another. There are even bindings, mousse-type stuff, that hold together things that nature never intended to bond: beetroot and fillet steak and foie gras for example. Tower presentation sacrifices the notion of distinct flavours and the eater's right to combine them for what something looks like and that for me is the biggest crime of all.