Has anything changed? Just that thinking about food, talking about food and watching food as a television spectator sport have all become national obsessions.

There’s one change we are convinced we’ve made as a nation, but I’m not so sure. Everyone seems to think we’ve left behind the Dark Ages of industrial food and crappy cooking, and are now the most diversely educated and dazzlingly ethnic of cooks and eaters. That England and the new English melting-pot cuisine is where it’s at; the French are over, their regional food losing its edge, its defining qualities, its boundaries blurred into homogeneity. As for the Italians, we’ve absorbed their cucina like stock into a risotto; we almost believe their classic dishes are our own, the spag bols, lasagnes, pestos. But we’ve become watchers not doers. And we’ve lost a lot of our traditional British food along the way. In our eagerness to embrace a new world of cuisines and ingredients we’ve lost our identity.

There’s as much comfort in the turning of leftovers into the best home-made dishes, as there is in the eating

We don’t home-cook an ‘Indian’; we go out to eat it or get a take-away. And that’s how most of us shop for food, not to cook it but to eat it. We are all too oven-ready and taste-the-difference lazy to disbelieve the supermarkets’ ‘whole-food’, ‘home-cooked’ labels. They try to make us believe in a new food world where the spuds are washed and prepped, carrots come ready-battoned. Their ads soothe, cajole and comfort us but their food doesn’t. What we choose to ignore is that the pictures are only pictures, the words are only words, and the food itself is primped and groomed to stand out like a girl in a cocktail dress at a football match.