BOOK REVIEW : Breezy Tour Down Supermarket Aisles : CAN YOU TRUST A TOMATO IN JANUARY? <i> by Vince Staten</i> ; Simon & Schuster $18, 224 pages

By ALEX RAKSIN

Aug. 16, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It will be clear to anyone who holds his nose while eating an onion (you’ll suspect it’s an apple) that we taste more with our nose than with our tongue. But the lesson of this breezy tour through American agricultural fields and supermarket aisles is that we taste most of all with our TV commercials.

Take the “Red Delicious” and “Golden Delicious” apples, for example. While journalist A. J. Liebling, in his 1962 book “Between Meals,” reflected the popular consensus that these “Still Lifes on Teacher’s Desk” don’t taste like anything, they remain far and away America’s best-selling fruits.

Food writer Vince Staten finds similar evidence in the aisles of his Prospect, Ky., supermarket, from Produce (those gassed, rock-hard commercial tomatoes remain bestsellers even though consumers say they have no flavor) to Cereal and Cake Mixes: “If a cereal has a great giveaway inside,” one manufacturer tells him, “it doesn’t much matter what it tastes like.”

In a country where Lemon Pledge contains more lemon than Country Time Lemonade, supermarket foods make especially easy targets, and in recent months, environmentally correct writers have been firing away with particular zeal. While Jeremy Rifkin’s 1992 book, “Beyond Beef,” blamed the meat industry for creating deserts, poisoning water systems and even starving the poor, for example, a piece in the New Yorker last month likened tomato gene engineers to children playing with dangerous chemistry sets.

Staten, in contrast, truly trusts a tomato in January. Sometimes his faith is disappointing, the result of lackadaisical research. More often, though, it is the endearing product of his uniquely American enthusiasm for supermarkets.

They are, he seems to realize, a kind of toy store that adults can get away with visiting regularly. In the grown-up world outside, economists and philosophers might be warning us of economic depression and social de-evolution, but in a supermarket’s bright aisles we see only reassuring signs of plenty and progress.

Progress is symbolized by that endless stream of foods claiming to be “new and improved,” and Staten enthusiastically introduces us to the “New and Improvers.” Led by a small cabal, the 221 certified members of the Society of Flavor Chemists, they can concoct a freshly picked strawberry taste out of meaty, grassy, woodsy and buttery tasting chemicals.

Despite press reports that a natural food movement swept the country in the ‘80s, Staten demonstrates that we continue to eat more fats, sugars and salts than most in the Western world. “In 1980, the four main meal entrees in surveyed households were: ham sandwich, hot dog, steak cheese sandwich,” he writes. “Nine years later, they were ham sandwich, hot dog, chicken and steak. So much for the health revolution.” Even at the height of the 1989 Alar-pesticide-cyanide scare, 73% of Americans said they were “completely or mostly confident” about supermarket food safety. One probable reason we continue to have a childlike relationship with our food is that the “experts” make it so hard to grow up. The Washington Post’s Meg Greenfield, for example, blames her nutritional nihilism on the “They Institute of America”: “First ‘they’ told us to eat lots of milk, eggs and meat, then ‘they’ told us to eat less of that and more fish, but then ‘they’ told us to eat less fatty fish (due to mercury), and now ‘they’ were telling us that the fattiest fish might reduce cholesterol. . . . Nothing lasts. No assertion has a shelf life of more than 11 months.”

This is not entirely true, of course. While scientists are still debating whether the genetically bred foods soon to come on the market will introduce toxins into the American diet (much as classical breeding once introduced dangerous levels of glyco-alkaloids in the Lenape Potato), there is a growing consensus that the social, medical and ecological costs of modern agriculture will inspire future farmers to return to at least some traditional methods.

Hailing that Darwinian ascent from “the caveman’s curdled dinosaur milk to the forever fresh miracle food called Cheez Whiz,” Staten isn’t exactly nostalgic.

But he does admit--after having wandered through one too many giant, swanky supermarkets with book centers, video sections, restaurants and giant aisles designed by economic ergonomists--to some wistfulness about Joyner’s Grocery, the plain brick neighborhood market he would visit as a child. “It was a place where my mother could ask Mae Joyner about the apples and find out they just came in yesterday,” he writes, “where I could sit on the counter and take in all the smells and sights and sounds and never be out of my mother’s sight.”