Most attempts to defend the indefensible - Shell, Parents For Guns, folk-dancing - are simply cynical and doomed and will eventually be found out and dealt with, preferably by means involving a stout tarred rope. Occasionally however these are genuine; naive and honestly meant; and we move on from anger to a fierce cringing pity. This is what we feel when David, the reborn ex-cynic in Nick Hornby's latest, How To Be Good, cautions against cheap jokes about Archer and Clinton ('I don't know the facts. You don't know the facts'). This is what we feel when people defend tofu.
Thus a welter of articles in the American press recently ('Let's talk Soy!' 'Fun with Tofu!') after it was voted the most disgusting food in the land. Even Americans do, occasionally, get some things entirely right - swearing, The West Wing, B-52s - and that they are magnificently right on this one should have been the end of it, but still out came the pitiable defence. 'I would venture to guess that most readers have eaten in a Chinese restaurant at some time,' began one piece. 'I just want to let you know, dear reader [yes, it was that kind of paper], that those cubes you thought were chicken all these years, were actually tofu!'
Well, actually, all these years in Chinese restaurants I've thought those cubes were actually clotted tramp-chunder, scraped and dried from the alley the night before then seasoned with Warfarin, so it's interesting to learn I suppose that they are actually a deliberate food. Someone meant this. It was, it turns out, the Chinese. About 2,000 years ago, they began taking soy beans and hitting them until they let out a vapid kind of milk, which then goes off and becomes curds and whey, then festers till rancid, then they squeeze off the whey so they're left one huge pile of curd, which it turns out is not after all an anagram.
And despite the name's ancient genesis it still sounds like a terrible modern marketing acronym, like its vicious new plastic cousin, Quorn, the Semtex of vegetarian foods, whose pharmacological lineage really is kept hidden (although there were rumours of a terrible accident in 1986 in a tofu-making plant in northern Albania; even today, children are still being born with seven buttocks and the head of an ant). It's somehow like that terrible PC Nineties attempt to replace the word 'dwarf' with the allegedly inoffensive 'porg' (person of restricted growth). Porg, Quorn, tofu. Etymologically speaking, there's just something wrong with these things.
And yet we still put them in our mouths(well, not porgs obviously). Justification, from the defenders, is twofold. First, there's the ancient bit; all about mysticism and weird metaphysical conceits such as good health and long life. So the Chinese have tofu. Fine. They also eat tiger penises. Tibetans have rancid yak milk; the citizens of Hong Kong eat thousand-year-eggs and monkey brains; Manchurians have rectal polyps (though that's nothing to do, strictly speaking, with food).
The second, stranger, defence is that it tastes of nothing. This is true. Although its texture is offputting enough - think wet Blu Tac, think the wriggly little earplugs they give you in planes, think, even, the interesting stuff on the earplugs when you take them out and reseal the pack as a little present for the children - it does not taste of anything. This is seen as a virtue. It can, goes the argument, taste of anything you want. Smother it in B-B-Q sauce and it might taste just like beef (so why not just eat yum beef?). Marinade it in nam pla and it tastes a bit like Thai fish curry (so why not just buy nice fish?). A strange food indeed whose proponents can only argue: 1. it's not as awful as it sounds; 2. odd people have been eating it for ages; 3. it can be anything you want it to be. Somehow, then, tofu manages to be both supremely bland and yet strangely offensive. It is the Tony Blair of foodstuffs, the Roger Moore of vegetarianism; the Lloyd-Webber of lunching. We would be better off chewing on porgs.
