Editorial: Some facts for you to chew over

Today's teeth indicate we're less savage.

Food just got a little faster.

Witness the blitz on blenders. Bullets, capsules and like processors are dominating TV ad breaks - and meal breaks. The whirring blades have whipped up a successful consumer buy-in.

Teeth, then, are facing redundancy in the wake of food's liquidation.

In our species' evolving dentition, (depending on one's creationism views) the decreasing reliance on the tooth is nothing new. The invention of fire to soften food, pottery to cook it in and less dependence on our incisors and canines to catch, kill and drag quarry has made for smaller teeth and jaws.

So, too, have improved grinding tools in the past few million years.

Yet teeth, some especially so, are things of wisdom: they're telling us we're lazy.

The relief of former evolutionary pressures has no doubt made us fat, while these blitzers are symptomatic of our fast-paced, sedentary existence.

My family went to Black Barn's Growers' Market on Saturday and came away with croissants, coffee, fruit, vegetables and herbs. A busy weekend notwithstanding, I wasn't in the least bit tempted to puree the items. No one is that time poor.

Modern intelligence should, of course, be celebrated. Both the advent of orthodontia and the development of language has successfully altered our species' toothed landscape and lifestyle.

Hence the paradox. Today's teeth indicate we're less savage, but they also suggest we're less civilised, drowning in the pace, drowning in another smoothie.

There'll be no magic blitzer for me. While I'm partial to a liquid lunch, I can't process a future in lieu of the chew.