William Blake could see a world in a grain of sand. And, if memory serves, a heaven in a wild flower. I haven't achieved those ocular miracles yet. But last week on an Air France flight, of all things, I did encounter one tiny object that seemed to epitomise the absurdity of modern life.

I write “of all things” because if you are looking for dismal culinary experiences at 30,000ft, Air France wouldn't be the prime culprit on anyone's list. But that only made the shock worse. If such great gourmands as the French can offer this gastronomical nonsense without apology, the world really is going to hell in a handcart.

It was an apple.

Or rather, it was once an apple. But high in the echelons of Air France there must be an executive with a thing against apples. Perhaps as a small child he was struck by one while playing a joyous game of junior boules in an orchard. Perhaps he swallowed a pip that lodged awkwardly in his tiny throat, requiring an on-the-spot tracheotomy with a scoutmaster's penknife that left him with a lifelong aversion to both apples and scoutmasters. Or perhaps he happened to be munching a crisp Granny Smith when he espied his childhood sweetheart snogging a rival behind the bike sheds. These things happen. Even the innocent apple can become laden with associations of treachery, tragedy or failure. Ask Freud. Or Adam and Eve.

Whatever the reason, this executive is clearly determined that no complete apple shall ever fly Air France while he's in charge. So what I was served comprised the following. The apple had been sliced into tiny slivers. Anything that might remind us that it had once grown upon a gnarly thing called a tree had been meticulously removed. No trace of skin, pips, stalk or core remained. These anaemic slivers had then been sealed in a plastic bag. This plastic bag had then been placed on a plastic food tray, which had itself then been sealed inside more plastic wrapping. There are probably trainloads of radioactive waste being freighted around England right now that are less well insulated than the remains of that poor, dismembered apple.

I have no doubt that, if challenged, Air France could point to about 37 different pieces of EU legislation that prevent it from serving its passengers uncut, unwrapped, rosy apples. A maggot might be lodged inside one, and that would clearly contravene quarantine regulations. Health'n'safety rules probably forbid anything as dangerous as an apple stalk from being placed in the hands of stupid members of the public such as you or me. We could easily stab ourselves, or our neighbours, in the eye. Then there are labour agreements to consider. If the apple hadn't been cut, skinned and bagged by trained members of the appropriate trade union it probably wouldn't qualify as food under French law. Then again, the apple might not be a perfectly symmetrical sphere, and that might be deemed to undermine the pristine corporate image of Air France. And finally, let us not forget that we are fighting a war against terror. If a whole apple fell into the wrong hands on a crowded aircraft, who knows what mayhem could be wrought?

I accept that rules are rules. Yet what a lot those apple fragments tell us about the 21st-century Western world! To me they symbolise all that is synthetic, over-packaged, over-sanitised and artificial about the way we live now. A few years ago some researchers discovered that 30 per cent of British primary school pupils thought meat could be extracted from animals without killing them (by amputation, perhaps?), and that nearly 10 per cent had not realised that there was any link at all between meat and animals. Those statistics shocked people, but they shouldn't have done. Why on earth would kids make any connection between the meat they see neatly packaged and labelled on supermarket shelves, and the gory reality of the slaughterhouse? Or between the ten-quid jeans they buy in certain clothing emporia and the Far Eastern sweatshops where miserably paid people turn out such items? The giant retailers spend a fortune on slick presentation and marketing to ensure that we don't make such unsettling links back to the origins of what we buy.

But it's not my intention here to castigate supermarkets or clothes shops, or bang the drum for “ethical” shopping. That's up to you. My point is that even when there's no need for subterfuge - as with my airline apple - we still aren't trusted with the genuine article. It's as if modern society has developed a pathological aversion to reality, often without anyone making a conscious decision that this should be so. We are screened, shielded, protected from contact with raw product or first-hand experience.

That's as true in the leisure industries as in retailing. More and more we view the world, or think we do, via a TV or computer screen. Children play video games in solitary nerdishness, rather than playing with each other in the park. Students crib off the web rather than searching out the original (and usually more trustworthy) source material. So do journalists. The television schedules are full of soap operas and so-called “reality TV” series (what a misnomer!) that simply reflect back to us the narrowness of our own minds. Even “adventure holidays” tend to be rigorously controlled packages to safe destinations where there's no real danger of experiencing nature red in tooth and claw.

I sense that the tide might be starting to turn. The next big thing, I predict, will be a quest for authenticity. People will want to strip away all those layers of processing and packaging, protecting and pampering. We will crave rawness. We won't want ranks of well-meaning nannies in the public and private sectors constructing thickets of bamboozling artifice and stifling regulation to protect us from “unsavoury” real life.

The corporations that latch on to this quickest will reap huge profits. Why doesn't Air France lead the way by trusting its passengers to eat whole apples, entirely by themselves?

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