FEELING LUCKY

I'm a big Flora fan - Flora margarine, that is. Recently, as I was buttering a slice of toasted bread. wait a minute, buttering? Is margarine forever destined to play second fiddle to butter; like nylon does to silk? For some odd reason, the shadow contest between butter and margarine has intrigued me since childhood; and, in all honesty, there are few things I find more hideous than butter. While refrigerated butter is usually hard and unyielding (and please don't ask me to leave it out to thaw), the relative softness of margarine would, to my mind, explain why its synthesis as a butter-substitute was inevitable. In today's fast-paced world, I'm curious to know whether there are still people dexterous and even-tempered enough to spread real butter on bread, without scowling.

Anyway, as I was about to bite into my Flora-ed toast, I thought I caught a glimpse of something unusual on the cover of the margarine tub. It read: 12-05-07 15:38. The reason I'd perhaps not noticed this before was because it was pixellated dotted inscriptions, or patterns of pixels, faintly applied as if by a digital ink-jet or laser beam. I suspected that it was shipped from the U.K., implying that the expiry date was less than a month away. Suddenly, I remembered that, as a special treat, my wife had recently purchased not one but two rather large tubs of Flora. Wasn't it therefore likely that both tubs came from the same product batch? I've noticed that when it comes to food, my intuition is nearly always right; the expiry date on the second tub was 18-05-07 22:46, which meant that this deadline was also imminent.

These days, it's quite difficult not to be obsessed about mass-produced food. What, with all the processed food products and pharmaceutical drugs we are exposed to, I guess it's not asking too much to check expiry dates on labels. Also, it would appear that most people have gradually replaced their primal fear of where the next meal would come from with the equally stomach-churning neurosis about the havoc preservatives (and genetically-modified compounds) might be setting off in our bodies. Taking cognizance of recent global scares like Bird flu, Mad-cow disease, SARS, and so on, my gut-level radar warned me that it was probably prudent to avoid eating expired food of any kind.

For no particular reason, I was slightly irritated by the Best by Date warnings. Am

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