If there is a food photograph that encompasses television’s impact on the way we eat, it is that one showing mothers passing bags of chips over a school fence; ‘sustenance’ for their kids, who were experiencing the Jamie Oliver effect. The snap, which was plastered across the national press, portrays a trinity of victims: the children, unlucky recipients of their parents’ bad feeding habits; the parents, who themselves suffered a poor quality food education; and the school itself, whose now unenviable task was to fill in those nurturing, cultural and educational gaps and deal both with the rebels in the playground and the guerrilla tactics of the mothers.

The greatest achievement of Jamie’s School Dinners, and its exposure of the true wrong misdoings of school kitchens nationwide, was that it brought the issue to the attention of millions and created a national debate that lasted weeks. But the series also confirmed how television has become the surrogate for basic needs; the ability to cook and understand nutrition being one of them. Where once there would have been a public sector department debating on and acting upon the gastronomic requirements of families (the Ministry of Food was abolished after the war), a television entertainer faces the job alone, hoping for a government reaction. On the subject of food, the media has become the sole educator, with food broadcasting the most potent form of all.

Cookery television had more than one parent, but the more remarkable of them – perhaps oddly – was feminism. The paradox of the newly emancipated woman with equal career opportunities would be her realisation, decades on, that the overfed yet undernourished kids in Jamie’s target schools may be her responsibility. Yet the female academics wanted girls’ cookery off the syllabus, the pigeon hole plugged. Meanwhile that other party responsible for passing down any remotely responsible information vis-à-vis nutrition was heading out the front door every morning to the job that had replaced her role as housewife.