Unfortunately, waiting in the wings to say "J'accuse" are a new branch of the Food Police who style themselves "The Fat Panel". It is no coincidence, that such a band of nanny-state warriors should start trying to spoil our fun at a time when we all need it more than ever. Nobody sentient can possibly have avoided everything from Jamie Oliver's school dinners mission to the five-a-day campaign or the exhortations that arise almost daily to eat less fat, sugar and salt. It is a choice and we make what we will of it. But the newly formed "Fat Panel" has temporarily abandoned its target audience, the morbidly obese, in favour of those of us who are celebrity chefs or cookbook writers.

We have become the corruptors, offering recipes to the masses that contain more than 100 per cent of the recommended daily amount of saturated fat in a single serving. Hellfire. If you actually buy cookery books and occasionally eat in decent restaurants, you are, to my mind, aware of what a balanced diet is and less than likely to be living on deep-fried Mars Bars and buckets of KFC and chips. And if you have bothered to make a pie or even to buy one, get one free, eat one, it doesn't mean you live on pies alone.

In troubled times we need comfort and it's not about whether it does our arteries good, it's about whether it does our souls good. Sometimes it has to be bad to be good. The queasily superior "Fat Panel", meanwhile, is trying to deter us from pleasure, directing us away from saturated fats to the land of margarine, low-fat polyunsaturated or mono-saturated spreads instead of butter and cream.