In a recent, highly scientific and exhaustive poll spread geographically over two or three blocks of the West Village (three women and four men, each representing three-quarters of a billion people), the milk from soybeans, curdled with a coagulant and better known as tofu, wound up just one notch above sea urchin and one notch below okra on the list of Most Despised Foods on the Planet.

Perhaps the results are generational and gender-specific: according to this study, no man on earth likes tofu; three-quarters of a billion women under 30 like it, one and a half billion over 30 don’t. (For the record, other Most Despised Foods include brains, offal, boiled English vegetable marrow and raw bivalves. Slime seems to be key. The most Most Despised Food on the Planet is liver, particularly if it was forced on you as a girl in school.) In short, it would appear that more people hate tofu than plan not to vote on Nov. 7. Still, it’s supposed to be good for you, right?

Tofu probably owes its place in the West as much to America’s concern for health as Bill Clinton owes his successful impeachment experience to Larry Flynt. But nutritional testing is about as conclusive as whether there’s life after death. Coffee is either O.K. or will kill you, fiber will either save your life or is useless (so much for all those underground psyllium-drilling investments) and though last week you couldn’t eat more than one egg per millennium without a guaranteed heart attack, this week you can eat about eight a day without danger. Even sacrosanct vitamin C — the government’s refusal to sanction the megadose of which was, for years, proof of fascism — now turns out to be pretty nugatory, too, unless you’ve got scurvy. (Note to self: stay away from British sailors.) According to data released by the Linus Pauling Institute — legacy of the late Nobelist, who advocated 18,000 milligrams of the stuff every day — you now need a daily dosage of only 250 to 500 milligrams of C. It may not be long before the predictions in the Marshall Brickman-Woody Allen screenplay for ”Sleeper” come to pass: that smoking, banana cream pie and bright red beef are good for you.

Tofu is no exception in the unpredictability sweepstakes. On the positive side, it is a nonanimal source of protein, with just about zero saturated fat, and is thought by doctors as best selling as Andrew Weil and Barry Sears to prevent certain kinds of cancer and heart disease. On the negative, it has more calories than you would think (120 for a measly four ounces). And now, with fiber — the onetime darling of health faddists — having recently been deemed useless in the prevention of colon cancer, a dose of cynicism may be a good idea. What to believe? Nothing, since the safety or danger of food changes weekly. If you like it, eat it; if you don’t, don’t.

My first exposure to health food came in college when, drooping with a 200-pound gut from a few years of campus sloth and consumption of most, if not all, of the Rolling Rock allotted to central Ohio, I eventually bowed to vanity and tried to lose weight. I began a few diets, but nothing worked, and somehow the health-food specter appeared before me. I’d venture that not one of the student body in Granville had even heard of health food in those days, and I think there was only a single vegetarian on campus, and he a social outcast. So it was necessary to motor to Columbus, 35 miles away, where a solitary small store kept illness and an early demise at bay. It was manned by a salesman who knew virtually nothing about his products and who looked ill and about to surrender to an early demise.

This was in the days before nutritional labeling, so I had no idea what the caloric value of anything was and wound up buying several bags of dried beans and a one-pound can of powdered Tigers Milk. I cooked up the beans, downed half the can of Tigers Milk and waited for the pounds to drop off. Instead, I turned into a bloated, rotting and fetid waddler with an even more Dickensian paunch. Tigers Milk, it turned out, weighed in at probably 14,000 calories a can, and since beans are also ludicrously high in calories, I didn’t have a prayer. I concluded then, and continue to believe now, that it’s next to impossible to lose weight eating health food; so much gunk is needed to cover up the taste that there are often more calories in a health-food meal than in a plateful of plain old buttered steak and spuds.

Until recently, I couldn’t stand to even look at tofu. Cold and uncooked, it’s squeaky, with the texture and disposition of a particularly upbeat sponge. In the mouth, it’s so darn watery and perky, it feels as though it will clean the enamel off your teeth, suck all the saliva from your mouth and then bounce right out onto the street to do some more good somewhere else. And it’s almost beige, the second least appetizing color for food. (Blue is first.)

Processed foods made from tofu are, by and large, dreadful. The ”hot dogs” are weird, soy cheese is nasty and Tofutti ice cream is downright punitive. Tofu yogurt is nearly as wretched as the food at Shea Stadium (which, in case you didn’t know, is probably the worst food in the world).

But that’s just my cranky Western palate. Worldwide, tofu is more popular than pasta, potatoes and poi, the staples of other cuisines. I realize that if you’re brought up on certain foods, you’re more disposed to them than if you’re introduced to them at the age of 30. It’s hard to imagine anyone discovering tripe and kidneys in middle age and declaring them to be his favorite foods. There must be some explanation for the demotic appeal of tofu in this country, so in a burst of food hubris, I decided to find something good about a food I basically didn’t like and, what’s more, regarded as irredeemable.

Surprisingly, tofu’s rubbery, squeaky chromosomes vanish when you saute it. Go ahead — drop a tablespoon of oil and one of Benecol or butter in a frying pan, cut the tofu into cubes and saute them on all sides until golden, about five to seven minutes. The outsides crisp pleasantly and the insides relax and gush. Because tofu takes on whatever flavor it’s cooked in, what you wind up with here are buttery little French-fried custards. Delicious. Or roll the cubes in chopped coriander and ginger, cayenne and sesame seeds, then saute in sesame oil. Depending on what you fry tofu in, it can be quite acceptable. Still weird, but certainly palatable.

Links healthy foods, tofu