Our past as hunters and gatherers has left us with distinctive taste in food. We like it fresh. An animal or vegetable that was living and growing only a few minutes ago has quite a different taste to one that has been stored. Many foods, from sprouts to fish, lose their pleasant flavour very quickly. Even the British diet would be delightful if it were fresh. But in bulk farming, a large amount of food is harvested at the same time and is then stored. This is clearly at variance with our animal nature. But this type of farming is highly efficient, and so has sadly become a fact of life.

While an animal or vegetable is alive, its immune system protects its evanescent compounds or regenerates them. When it dies, all this stops. Bacterial attack, crosslinking and decomposition all start at once. Freezing, that brutal attempt to stop the clock, seems to work best with the bulk components. One food-processing company claims to freeze its vegetable product within 2 hours of picking it, hoping to trap the brief trace compounds of freshness while they last. Daedalus also recalls how the makers of instant coffee put a key flavour volatile in the space at the top of each jar, so the illusion of the real thing survives at least for a moment. DREADCO biochemists are now studying the trace compounds present in fresh foodstuffs.

This delicate and tricky work must be done quickly, using food picked or killed and transported to the lab with equal rapidity. For each foodstuff, Daedalus hopes to identify or synthesize just those elusive volatiles that restore the illusion of freshness to the long-stored product. Farming, that dreary but efficient business, will at last be matched to our instinctive nature.

Standard condiments, such as salt, pepper or monosodium glutamate, are 'amplifiers': they exaggerate whatever taste the food has at the time. By contrast, each DREADCO 'elixir of freshness' will restore the food's own character, so it tastes fresh again. Like pepper, it will be added at the table rather than in the pot. It may take the form of an inert tasteless powder with an added volatile, or a spray-can of liquid or vapour. Daedalus cannot guess how many will be needed. In the worst case, every foodstuff will need its own elixir. But with luck, only a few elixirs will be needed to revive that elusive sense of freshness — one for meat, say, and one for vegetables. Even calorie-counting, vegetarianism and other dietary extremes will gain new pleasure and respectability.