TV itself, of course, is peppered with cookery contests, ballroom dancing, home renovation and make and mend. This is what we call progress. “Chef” is top of a mother’s wishlist for their kid’s career, in the way that air hostesses used to be. (Both, of course, are — fashionable or not — sweaty, scary, underpaid and, away from the TV lights, deeply unglamorous.)

So we watch bake-offs, read cookbooks, spend a fortune on ready meals and eat out when we are not fasting as part of our 5:2 regime. Small wonder we swell to mammoth proportions. Or, perversely, get skeletal like the children who don’t want an ounce of flesh to spoil their chances of becoming Cara Delevingne. There is too much emphasis on food. My darling friend Elspeth rarely ate after 3 p.m. save for a single malt at 7 o’clock and she lived to one hundred and three.

Stomach stapling is on the National Health in some areas of the country. It is, I admit, less obvious than sewing up the mouth but it amounts to the same thing. We have no discipline, my generation; we need instant gratification, preferably with whipped cream and salted caramel. We drink coffee twice a day at three quid a paper cup, buy three jumbo-sized bags of crisps because they’re on special offer — and then crunch through them all before The One Show is over. We fall for waffles, muffins, flapjacks, sweet crêpes in the street, and crap street-food in the home.

Restaurants are reviewed with the same vitriol which Nicholas de Jongh once brought to theatre criticism. If you saw A.A. Gill approach the freshly-sanded door of your new restaurant, notebook in hand, would you greet him? Or would you hide in the loo, or chuck up in his cassoulet? Either way, he is going to queer your idealistic pitch to introduce fusion food to the confusion of the foodie. Meanwhile, in the hinterland of social media lurk the online punters who just want revenge for your slow service on the free opening night, the loafers who want to show they can afford to eat out nightly and the “cereal” bloggers, who are trying to get A.A. Gill’s job.

“Ooh, I wish food was just a pill you could take,” my late mother would sigh, as once again nobody offered to help her wash the pots. As I scrape the rust from the state-of-the-art frying pan which cost more than three sessions with a personal trainer, I suddenly know what she meant. Perhaps Dr Liam Fox could give up the day job and invent such a pill?

While I’m at it, may I take issue with the favoured menu-terminology “pan-fried”? I mean, what the hell else do we fry in? A sieve? And why would the chosen vessel of cooking make me hanker for it?  Oh, a pan! A pan? You fried it in a pan? In that case — yes, yes, YES!