When the heartaches are Special K

For many years now, my palate has been trying to kill me. In the end, it's bound to succeed. But it won't look like murder - it'll be ascribed to something apparently innocent, like "heart disease", "type 2 diabetes" or "exhaustion due to lifting mince pies". In reality, it will have been slow poisoning.

Everything my mouth tells me about what foods do to my body is a lie. If it screams: "Yes! Devour! Consume! More of this please! This is the very stuff of life itself!", it means I'm eating a Stilton and streaky bacon sandwich, deep fried in goose fat and served in a bucket of double cream. If it's saying: "Oh no, there's something wrong here - you might want to spit this out. Are you sure this is even food?", it's because I'm struggling through a salad.

I do eat some fruit and vegetables, but out of grim duty because I believe the people who've told me it's necessary - I have come to recognise my taste buds' malevolent purpose - but without that "finish your greens" tutoring, I would happily eat three meals of carcinogenic cholesterol a day, because that's the only sort of grub that genuinely feels to me like nourishment.

At least I can ignore all those conflicting scientific reports, saying that blueberries are or aren't superfoods, salmon gives you or cures cancer, cheese enhances scepticism or wheat is a sign of intolerance. I say let's stand the scientists down. I can tell everyone exactly what foods are good or bad for them: I love the latter and think the former taste like shit. (Metaphorically - I can only assume, given that eating excrement is very bad for you, that to me it would be ambrosia.) It's a useful skill, I suppose. But I'm not letting my palate off the hook - it still means me harm, even if it hasn't mastered reverse psychology.

So I was interested by last week's news that breakfast cereals are delicious. I'd assumed the opposite: advertising vitamins, minerals and slow-release energy, they sounded as mouthwatering as a cream cracker-eating race and so I hadn't eaten any for years. But it seems the manufacturers were being modest.

A survey of 100 cereals by Which? found that 31 had more than four teaspoons of sugar in them per bowl and many contained more sugar than a helping of Tesco's dark chocolate fudge brownie ice cream, while 100g of Tesco Special Flakes have the same salt content as Walkers ready-salted crisps.

They sound like a delicious treat after all, I thought to myself, and so much more convenient than frying eggs and bacon. Just add milk and my indulgent delicacy is ready. So I went out and bought myself a variety pack, opened a nice bottle of wine and tucked in.

It's sludge. They all turn to sludge. They start off a bit crunchy, which is fine, but then they go soft and gooey - and not in a nice way like caramel or egg yolk, but more like slurry or milk after a summer in the sun. The taste isn't actually horrible - all that sugar and salt must help a bit - but it's throwing good after bad. Ludicrously tasty it isn't.

What is ludicrous is that something that has the advantages of delicious killer ingredients uses them to such little effect. It's the first time in years that eating something bad for me has failed to hit the spot. It was as depressing as KFC chips; this, I thought to myself, is no way to die.

No wonder the manufacturers had to pretend the cereals were healthy. And they certainly taste healthy enough for people to believe it. You don't feel you need to check the ingredients for dangerous goodies when there's a party in your mouth but no one's brought a bottle.

How did we become a nation of breakfast cereal eaters? Does the gruelling nature of consuming it appeal to a sort of neo-Christian urge to self-harm? Is it like mortification of the flesh - we assume it's virtuous because it's unpleasant?

If so, we've created a huge market for a weird product that isn't good for us and is nowhere near as nice as toast. Even toast with margarine and diabetic jam is like a night alone in a cake shop compared with a bowl of All-Bran. I was given All-Bran a few times as a child on the basis that it keeps you regular. Looking at it, I found that plausible.

Breakfast is often called "the most important meal of the day" but it must be the least important. No other meal would be given over to mass-manufactured dried and reconstituted shards of shit knows what that you have to moisten in order to be able to swallow. They don't sell lunch cereals that you add gravy to.

I would rather leave my early-morning hunger unsated than have it die such an inglorious death; to be suppressed, rather than assuaged, by sludgy brown flakes. I mean, "flakes" for goodness sake! It sounds like a dermatological symptom. You might as well call them scabs: "Kellogg's Bran-Scabs - never has so much sugar been so effectively suppressed by the bland illusion of roughage!"

There are breakfast cereals that don't contain loads of salt or sugar, but they taste even worse. People try to jazz them up with fruit or yoghurt. It never works - they'd be better off deep frying the stuff and serving it with a mayonnaise dip. Now there's a tasty delivery mechanism for riboflavin.