Kansas City - 16 February 1990

It used to be that whenever you went west, the further you drew away from the east, the more rapidly did the affairs of the east fade away.

That's to say the preoccupations of New York, its money markets, its politics, its theatres, books and the national preoccupations of the Congress. And, even more, the concerns of Europe and with Europe, retreated like chapters you'd just finished in a history book.

Those were the days, and I'm talking about the '40s and '50s, when I used to advise newly-appointed foreign correspondents from Britain or France, Italy, Sweden, if they sought advice, before they settled in Washington, to go and live for a month in Kansas City, just halfway across the country.

The big Kansas City, in Missouri, that is, not Kansas City, Kansas. The point being that Kansas City, a population then, and now, of about half a million, was the crossroads and marketplace for the entire western half of the United States.

It had 11 railroad stations with 190 trunk lines, the terminals or transfer points for 11 separate railroads. It had one of the first big airports. It lay on the wide Missouri River where it turns north. So between the river traffic and the railroads, fanning out north and south and west, Kansas City was the reception centre, the wholesale market, the hub for the handling of the crops of half the continent – the wheat of the plains, the corn, the maize and vegetables of the Midwest bread basket, the cotton of the south, the lumber of the north.

It was the banking centre for farmers from a thousand-mile arc around. If there was an archetypal American capital city, Kansas City was it. From its earliest days, it had developed a great newspaper and in my time, early and late, to wake up and read the Kansas City Star, instead of the New York Times, was a revelation.

Not only the sort of information it poured out but its view of American life, society and politics was very different from anything you'd pick up in Boston or New York, or Atlanta or New Orleans. What's more to the point, it was more typical of more cities and regions in the heartland of the country than any other place.

It was, most of the time, conservative, rural, republican and – when foreign wars rumbled on the horizon – it was isolationist. It saw itself, and tried to keep itself, isolated from the scheming barons of Wall Street. The good place, a rewarding place, in other words, from which to begin to know America.

Incidentally, I never knew any correspondent who took my advice. Not because they weren't inclined to believe me, but their editors held firm to the preconception that the first and last place to know about America was Washington.

Sending a correspondent on his arrival to Kansas City seemed about as mad as sending an American correspondent, newly assigned to England, to Manchester or Leeds – which, by the way, wouldn't be such a bad idea.

All American correspondents in Britain, to this day, arrive in London and tend to stay there, unless there's a big airplane accident in Scotland, say. And they bring with them a comfortable stock of preconceptions about Britain and Britons which are generally two generations out of date.

Their editors require an early filing of pieces on class distinctions, on the royal family today, pieces on the London theatre, on the see-saw relative popularity of Mrs Thatcher and M. Kinnock, and, more recently, astonished pieces on the quality – if that's the word – and the virulence of the tabloids that most Britons read.

But the day's long gone when there'd be much point in staying in Kansas City to see a microcosm of much of America. Not because it's much changed but because everywhere begins to look the same and get the same news, and market the same columnists, the same commentators.

And you know who, what, has been, for 30 years or more, the great leveller? Television. For over 30 years, the three commercial networks and the public non-commercial network have fed their programmes to hundreds of affiliates in every corner and part of the country.

On all the big issues of the day, domestic or foreign, the news and the views arrive in Washington or New York or wherever there's some big accident or prison break or drug bust, and the whole country sees the same account. Accounts, I should say, from the three anchormen of the three big networks, from the two men and one woman who anchor the public television network.

So that in San Francisco, from which I've just returned, I was watching, listening and reading the same voluminous mass of reports on the problem of German reunification, on Mr Mandela's release and its consequences, on the drug conference in Cartagena, on the never- ending issue on how to deal with Japan's export trade and its developing, highly developing, high technology.

So, it's a relief when something comes up that appears to be peculiarly American and, for the moment, catches the attention of the whole country.

Nothing I can think of is more American, has remained for so long an American preoccupation, than the concern with health, especially with foods that somebody says, somebody fears, might cause cancer, heart attack, high blood pressure.

Why this should be more of an obsession with Americans, than say with the French or the Chinese, is due to two, I think, contradictory views of life and death which Americans pick up in childhood. One is Mark Twain's admirable and undebatable line, "Nobody gets out alive".

The other, though, which has superseded this home truth has been best expressed by an American lady who lives in London and who, not so long ago, wrote a funny, a cute, book, called Brit-Think, Ameri-Think, Miss Jane Walmsley said it, "In America, death is optional".

In no other country do otherwise intelligent people talk seriously about the prospect, the early possibility, as of a new and automatic gearshift, of living to be 120. Why not 150? They realise, of course, that there will have to be some conquered preliminaries, chief of which is avoiding foods which will not cause the notorious dread diseases.

And for about 30 years now, the popular knowledge which is as much taken for granted as the circulation of the blood is that the daily demon who must be exorcised is cholesterol.

The popular wisdom does not yet run to an accurate description of what it is. Namely, a monohydric alcohol, a sterol, widely distributed in animal tissues and occurring in the yolk of eggs, various oils, fats, nerve tissue of the brain and spinal cord, the liver, kidneys and adrenal glands.

The popular wisdom knows that cholesterol, too much of it, can cause clots and give you a heart attack or high blood pressure. And lately, the popular knowledge has been supplemented or confused by the word that there are two kinds – high-density lipoproteins, which contain more protein than low-density lipoproteins.

Even this distinction is too fussy to go into. We now settle for the scary knowledge that there is good and bad cholesterol and that, hang it, either kind is better avoided.

So, for several years, we've been running away from animal fats. There is a very marked national slump in beef eating, and running towards fish and chicken and salads and, with cancer in mind, bran, fibre – what they used to call roughage.

And during the past year there was a sudden fashion for oats. Oat bran. Oat bran everything, from porridge, to bread, to cookies. And recently, the most famous, old-time manufacturer of breakfast oats went so far as to put on their famous package "lowers cholesterol".

Last month, the most eminent of American medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine came out with a careful study which concluded that oats have no special property for banning cholesterol or lowering it.

If the person who loves to gobble his porridge gets lower cholesterol, it's only because he gets too full to eat as much animal fat as he would if he didn't eat his porridge. The same result would come from eating strips of carpet, which doesn't mean that a carpet diet will lower your cholesterol. It might well upset your vitality, not to mention your digestion.

Well, the government agency that polices false health claims in advertising, the Food and Drug Administration, has declared the oats' people culpable of a foolish claim. And this has started the agency going on a whole campaign to survey the packages, the literature, the television advertising of every sort of food product and stop them making false health claims. Most of all, it's going to do a lot of damage to the innumerable products that claim to lower cholesterol.

The same week, another blow was struck, this time to the fashionable yuppie world, or those that aspire to yuppiedom. Bottled water is so chic and is regularly asked for by people edging their way up the social ladder. The refreshment of choice of such people has been Perrier, which for years Orson Welles used to tell us in his doomsday baritone, "Perrier, from the centre of the earth".

Well, no matter where it comes from, the Food and Drug Administration last week recalled every bottle of it from shelves throughout the United States because traces of benzene – benzene! – were found in a few bottles. The recall amounted to 160 million bottles, $70 million-worth which, they used to say, "Ain't hay".

I'd recommend to the distraught yuppies a consumer report put out several years ago, a whole issue devoted to chemical analysis of about a score of popular bottled waters.

The conclusion? That the purest water available in the United States came, not from the centre of the earth, but from the Groton Reservoir, up the Hudson River. It is known as New York City tap water.

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