Artistic tribute fuels our appetite

IN KYOTO, Japan's famed kaiseki restaurants serve cutting-edge haute cuisine – art you can eat. In one course, items are arranged on a plate to look like a rock garden. In another, grilled squid is cut to resemble the curled stem of a flower.

It is only right that Scotland's culinary delicacy, the Tunnock's Teacake, should take its place in the pantheon of Art Haute Cuisine. Move over Andy Warhol and those rusty cans of soup. Tunnock's is the new defining image of an age struggling with its demons and biggest among them the frenzied desire to scoff all the Tunnock's on a plate.

The wrapping may not be as refined as oriental art or the content quite as subtle as some would wish. But the Teacake is an icon, a masterpiece of its genre, a Cezanne of curly whirls, a Monet of graceful elegance, while the exuberant application of wrapping colour has all the sensuous richness of a Goya.

Why should the National Gallery bother saving more Titians for the nation when it has such wonderful art on its doorstep, if not quite yet in its restaurant? It could create an ensemble of National Art You Can Eat, Colourists You Can Consume. Why not a framed Tunnock's Original on one wall, a can of Irn-Bru on the other, with intervening spaces reserved for Scotch pies and that lingering delicacy, Lorne sausage? Better still, arrange them all on one plate. Still life will never be the same.