Health stories to make you give up: pt2

A salad of rare quality

The award for the biggest throw-your-hands-up-in-despair moment to come out of last week’s health stories was not membership fees for the NHS or even African sand clogging up our lungs.

It goes instead to University College London for announcing that five a day isn’t enough, and we should all aim for seven a day.

Actually, there’s no scientific evidence that five – or seven – a day is an essential health requirement, although this advice does at least have the benefit of making sense.

The recommendation also says not that the majority of your seven should come from veggies, because fruit contains sugar and even natural sugars should be treated with care.

At which point I find myself musing over whether olives and tomatoes – technically fruits – count as such in this context.

I’m not bad on the old five a day: sometimes I don’t make it and sometimes I get more than that.

Breakfast is the biggest bugbear though.

A helpful – or attempting to be – piece on the BBC website last week was trying to suggest how you could increase your intake of veg, but managed only one practical (sort of) suggestion: adding a handful of spinach to a breakfast omelette.

Now, my understanding on five a day has long been that a portion is something like a whole apple, where it's an obvious whole, or about 80g of a food that doesn’t come as such a convenient handful.

But that’s an awful lot of spinach – or any other leafy food.

The advice also suggests swerving clear of fruit juice and drinks like smoothies, simply because they concentrate a lot of fruit – and therefore sugar – into a single portion.

And also based on my understanding of previous advice, only one portion of any veg counts per day – so no, if you have three portions of mushrooms, you can’t count it as three – and the same goes for pulses.

Variety is part of what makes sense.

To be honest, I ignore the fruit juice one myself – a small glass a day of pure stuff will not be the death of me.

So how else do you get your five – let alone seven?

Weekends are easy. On Sunday, for instance, I had a late but substantial breakfast, with quality bacon and scrambled egg, fried bread – and enough tomato, mushrooms and baked beans to constitute three portions. Plus a glass of fruit juice.

After that, it’s a coast.

Dinner came with carrots and leeks, and there was a little fruit after.

That was seven without any strain.

The difficulty is weekdays.

The most I’m likely to get if I breakfast at home is fruit compote (which means some added sugar) in plain (unsweetened) yogurt and a small glass of juice.

These days, breakfast out usually means eggs on toast – the toast might not be top-quality bread, but at least it's mostly my only bread of the day.

Quality eggs on toast

Lunches are easier – if I take my own, which I manage approximately 2/3 of the time, then it’ll be assorted salad and pickled veg, with some source of protein.

But if lunches are bought out, then most of the time I either end up with soup (vegetarian, so a source of at least one portion) or something between lumps of factory bread, which is never going to give you much on the greens front.

It’s worth noting here that mass-produced bread may be the reason for the rise in some intolerances: there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of people who cannot eat bread in the UK because it makes them feel bloated, but have no such problem on the other side of the Channel. And that’s without mentioning the taste.

However, back to those bought lunches: most salads struggle to be appetising.

Last week saw an exception that proved the rule. Arriving early in Islington for a job, I had time to while away and a need for lunch, so took the opportunity to enjoy the first al fresco meal of the year on a gorgeous spring day, at a café called The Blue Legume (geddit?).

Scanning the menu, I opted for a goat’s cheese salad.

It came in a large bowl that was filled with a veritable mountain of assorted leaves, plus cherry tomatoes, all topped with garlic ‘crouton’ – actually a thick piece of baguette, sliced on the bias – and a roundel of very slightly melted cheese, and with a dressing that included loads of finely-chopped walnut.

The main thing to point out is that the leaves were worth eating – not bland or lifeless or left in a dressing for hours to become simply depressing, as it so often the case. Even the little tomatoes had actual taste – no mean achievement in this country, particularly at this time of year.

The crouton was seriously garlicky, the cheese as pleasing as it should be and the dressing an ideal compliment without overwhelming everything or soaking the leaves.

I like salad, but there’s a reason I still remember one eaten in a café for local office workers near the railway station in Perpignan in spring 2006.

And the reason that I remember it was because it wasn’t a posh café and yet it was one of the first times I realised how good leaves can be – and it had three sorts of cheese and not just the one, rather bland one that you’d be likely to get in the UK if you ordered a cheese salad.

Dinner, as on Sunday, sorts itself out quite efficiently: it's not difficult or time-consuming to peel and slice a carrot and toss a few peas into boiling water out of the freezer – and frozen peas are one of life’s decent conveniences that don’t destroy the nutrition.

But given UK food culture in general, it’s not difficult to see why anyone would, on reading this new health advice, just feel like giving up entirely.

Ultimately, all this sort of advice seems counterproductive and will leave people feeling that they face impossible challenges – particularly if they read enough to know that it’s not even grounded in concrete scientific proof.

So what do you do? The easiest thing, it seems to me – and I realise that this too has its logistical complexities – is to eat fresh food, freshly prepared; to eat as little heavily processed food as possible and to eat as big a variety of vegetables as possible.

Eat good-quality protein, cut back on the crap bread, eat three meals a day and don’t snack as a matter of routine.

Don’t worry about a couple of sugars in your afternoon cuppa, but avoiding processed foods and loads of fizzy drinks will keep your sugar consumption down – and there seems to be a growing body of evidence that artificial sweeteners aren’t good for health either. But do drink water – something that you can even get free.

Apart from our food culture, though, there is another elephant in the room. And that is falling incomes and the rising cost of living.

It’s easy to tell people to eat better: to eat this or that or the other. But when the majority of people’s incomes have been falling steadily for 30 years – and more rapidly in recent ones – against a rising cost of living, then something has to give.

And for many, one of the few things that they feel they can control to a degree is food. It’s arguably easier to buy cheaper food than it is to cut lighting or heating beyond a certain point.

It’s no surprise that, in the last few years, average household spending on food has declined further, from a point that was already well below that on the Continent.

If we really want to change how people eat, there are a very great many things that need changing. Hectoring them with constant messages about what they should eat and how many minutes of how many days a week they should do whatever amount of exercise really will only start to make them feel it’s all hopeless anyway.

Bread of heaven

For many people, the realisation that they’re likely to be made redundant in the not-too-distant future is one of the most unwelcome pieces of news that they can receive.

But for some, it can offer the opportunity for a major change of direction.

Bill King had spent years working in local government in the Cwmbran area of Wales. More than that – he was also a trade union convenor.

But when he realised that his own job was to be rationalised away, he saw a possibility and seized the opportunity with both hands.

“I’ve always cooked,” he explains in his soft burr, which is more West Country than Wales. With a father in the RAF, he was leaving the UK for Suez at three weeks old and only came back when he was 10.

“For my sins, I got a charity scholarship to a public school [he was in the same class as RSC and The Thick of It actor Roger Allam] and you did learn to cook.

“When you’ve eaten at 6 o’clock in the evening, you’re going to be hungry at 8 o’clock, 10 o’clock whatever. One of the first things I did, when I got into it, was set up what I suppose was one of the first ever supper clubs.

“It was a kind of covert dining club. We found a room that wasn’t being used, and I'd cook in one of the very small kitchens upstairs, and then 10 or 20 people would just get together and have food.

"So I always have cooked and was largely self-taught. Always done all the cooking at home."

His partner Janet never learned to cook, he explains, not least because her mother “god love her – couldn’t cook to save her life. She was set in her ways. For example, 1 April was salad season until the 30 October.

“And it went on a strict rotation: cheese, ham, cheese ham, with the immortal question: ‘ow d’ya want yer salad? On a plate or in a saaandwich?’

“And Sunday lunch would go pork, lamb, beef, chicken; pork, lamb, beef, chicken – irrespective of the weather. Friday lunchtime would be fish in plastic bags. Saturday lunch was always pie and chips from the chippy.

“She came and ate with us once and I’d cooked my usual incredibly rare bit of beef, and she said: ‘just how I love my beef!’ and I thought: ‘why do you cook yours like boot leather then?”

“So I’ve always cooked. I’m not artistic, but I put stuff into cooking that I probably couldn’t put into anything else.

“Years back – probably 20 years ago – I was given a voucher for a one-day course at Ballymaloe, and I went and had a great time, and thought: ‘I’ve got to go there; I’ve got to do the three-month course.”

That’s not cheap and, he says, every time he had just got the money together, “some major disaster would come up” and he was back to square one, saving for it.

But eventually, he had enough in the bank. Then, as the end of a lengthy job evaluation neared, which his union duties had seen him heavily involved in, it became “clear that I’d never be going back to my old job after it”.

His employer agreed that, under those circumstances and since it was really rather sensible to be planning for an alternative future, he could use a combination of paid leave and unpaid leave to make up the three months of the course.

“It was the best three months of my life,” he says.

“Extremely intense. People talk about going into the ‘Ballymaloe bubble’ and you do kind of live in one. It’s in the middle of a 100-acre organic farm with 10 acres of organic market garden, and effectively you do a three-year catering college course in 12 weeks.

“The way you do it – the average college course is nine to 3.30, breaks and whatever: at Ballymaloe, you’re in the kitchen from eight to 1.30. You get a short break, then at quarter to two, you’re back into demonstrations until, say, quarter past, half past five, with a tasting at the end.

“Then you get another quick tea break and there’s a lecture of some variety – could be on wine, cheese – so you’re generally finishing seven or eight o’clock at night. You go back, write out your work for the next day, file the recipes for what you’ve been cooking that day – and go to bed.

“And at 7 o'clock in the morning, you have ‘assorted duties’, which may be getting fresh veg out of the field, selecting the herbs from the herb garden ... or milking the cows.”

If those “assorted duties” mean milking the Jerseys, which Bill describes as “the prime job”, students then separate the milk to make butter and cheese, nipping back all morning to stir the curds for the latter.

It’s not difficult to see how three months of 18 to 19-hour days can mount into the equivalent of a three-year course.

And then there are the weekends: all on a ‘voluntary basis’ (Bill’s quotation marks). Students are sent out for a different kind of training – to Cork on a Friday to do a night shift with an artisan baker or to a hotel or restaurant to wait on tables for the evening, for instance.

The Ballymaloe philosophy, he explains, is an holistic one: students need to gain a really wide understanding of food – “where it comes from, how to use it, how to process it, how to serve it”; there are even some basic lessons in business.

The final exam requires students to complete such varied tasks as identifying 20 kinds of salad and drawing a diagram of a table setting, while “the first recipe you get at Ballymaloe is actually for compost”.

Because, he notes, as Ballymaloe founder and slow food doyen “Darina [Allen] says, ‘good food starts with good earth’.”

Bill is a delightful raconteur, and he happily describes things in great detail, seasoned with anecdote and his mimicry.

But after Ballymaloe, what then?

“I’ve always enjoyed making bread, and at Ballymaloe you make bread every day”. But there’s another rather special advantage.

“It’s the easiest way to get past environmental health,” he reveals.

“There’s very little risk in bread. Done properly, it’s flour, it’s water, it’s salt, it’s yeast. It bakes at 230 degrees. That will kill any bacteria.”

Even though he’s currently only got a double oven – there's another oven on order – he’s still able to bake from within his home kitchen.

There are still schedules for cleaning his kitchen and equipment, including deep cleans, but he doesn't have to wash his baking tins (“unless something sticks to them”). Regular use seasons them, and environmental health is happy with that, as long as he stores them upside down so that nothing can get inside.

But baking is “also something you can teach people – and teaching is far more profitable than making bread,” he adds with a wry version of his characteristic laugh.

“The overheads are extremely limited and it only takes four hours!”

Which is probably a good thing. He was given a helpful spreadsheet by the Welsh government when he started the business, and “the last time I looked at it, my hourly rate was 98p!”

On the other hand, he observes that his new career has made a ‘phenomenal’ difference to his quality of life.

“I loved my years in the trade union movement,” he adds, proudly pointing to his UNISON lifetime membership badge, “but I get the same adrenalin rush when I’ve done a really big bake” as after a week at annual conference.

Indeed, he had nipped up to Liverpool for the day to meet old friends and catch up on the gossip at this year's conference.

And he says that it’s an incredible buzz to have people going back, time again, to see him on a market “and saying things like: ‘thank god we’re here early ... you were out of such and such last week and it’s the best I’ve ever had’. And you think: ‘this is nice. This is what I want to do’.

Baking has also opened doors that he never expected, and he’s made many new friends.

He mentions Arun Kapil of Green Saffron Spices – “you will hear a hell of lot more of him” – and enthuses about how the former musician blends his spices, treating his work like music, looking to combine “high notes, low notes, medium notes”.

“I’ll tell you how good he is – he makes bespoke spice mixes for Mark Hix, Richard Corrigan and Gordon Ramsey, and he’s a consultant to some bloke called Blumenthal!”

It’s a friendship that means that, when Arun gives “tutored master classes and tastings” at this summer’s Abergavenny Food Festival, Bill will be baking the breads that he will use.

In September, he’s off to Cork for the Celtic Cook Off. It’s a sort of Ready Steady Cook-style competition, using just local ingredients, and featuring chefs from all across the Celtic world, including Cornwall and Brittany.

They’ll start the event with a big lunch – and Bill is the baker of choice for both the lunch and for the cook off.

Then in October, he’ll be doing a “hands-on session at the Newport Food Festival”.

It is, he says, a bit more “about who you know than how good you are”, but then again, you don't get invited back into that company if you're not good.

Just before Christmas last year, he reveals that Rachel Allen (Darina’s daughter-in-law) was over here and they’d met up, with her introducing him to some influential people as “the best baker we had at Ballymaloe!”

“I’m sure I wasn’t,” says Bill, “but that got me an in with chef and TV presenter Matt Tebbutt!”

He talks about the rising food scene in his part of Wales – not just top chefs, but good producers too.

And it’s clear that his own food philosophy extends way beyond bread.

There are farmers that he knows, and he describes not only how they look after their animals, but also how they slaughter them, in the least stressful manner possible. It’s light years away from the horror stories of industrialised, centralised abattoirs.

Which is a good thing, since (accidentally) he actually managed to take Janet on a visit to an abattoir on a recent wedding anniversary.

In the meantime, of course, the final product of such an approach, in your pan or under your grill, and most certainly on your plate, is so much better for having had such care taken.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he says, after observing that he’s always understood the value of fresh, quality ingredients, but “in many ways, there’s nothing as satisfying as a fishfinger sandwich, with ketchup, on some really thick, sliced industrial white.”

And he then gives another example of how to use a cheap, Chorleywood loaf.

“That bread is so flimsy … take the crusts off, roll it out – you can get it paper thin – dip in melted butter, either side; stick it in a bun tin, bake it off in the oven for 10 minutes, and you have the most amazing, crisp stuff.

“And I’ve had people say: ‘that’s the most amazing pastry we’ve tasted’, and you tell ’em: ‘actually, it’s just really cheap bread!’

He’s been contemplating that busy festival ‘season’ that is approaching, and remembering the festivals that he used to go to. The Jerry Garcia t-shirt gives a hint.

“It’s really worrying,” he muses, “to think that most of the people I went to see are dead.” And then he bursts out into Falstaffian laughter once more.

He remembers seeing “The Doors and Hendrix at the Isle of Wight.

“I first saw the Grateful Dead in ’72 … I love Jerry,” he adds, before noting that the food world has also led him to “a bigger Dead head than myself” in James Swift, who runs Trealy Farm, which makes British charcuterie.

The discovery of their mutual love of Grateful Dead came at last year’s Newport Food Festival, where Bill was the “official blogger or something to that effect”.

A completely accidental comment saw James revealing that he’d got recordings of 1,500 live shows.

Such is the way to start a friendship.

And with thoughts of such music, another strand of memory begins to unfurl.

“In those days, I was on a fairly macrobiotic diet – or mung beans 500 ways. The only place you could get them in Aberystwyth was a place called The Happy Stores, which was run by one of these weird and wonderful cults and they were all trying to recruit you if you went in to buy anything.

“‘A pound of balti peas, please’. ‘Would you like to come out to the ashram for a weekend?’ ‘No, just my peas please’.”

In a complete swing around from his admission of a brief period of vegetarianism, Bill has a book that he’s keen to recommend – An Irish Butcher Shop by Pat Whelan.

Pat is a seventh-generation farmer and fifth-generation butcher who now runs James Whelan Butchers in Ireland, and is committed to sustainability, nose-to-tail eating and quality, and Bill describes the book as a “a brilliant treatise on cooking”.

Pat’s philosophy is that ‘knowledge without sharing is merely information’, says Bill, so Pat shares it – and so does Bill himself.

The conversation wanders off into further discussion of the link between compassionate farming and the quality of produce, plus the disconnect in the UK between food and how it is produced, which allows a good laugh about a recent Apprentice competitor who thought that a field of horses was a field of dogs.

Bill would happily talk the hind legs off the proverbial donkey when it comes to matters culinary, but one thing’s clear: for this artisanal baker, finding himself forced into a career change in his mid-50s really has proved to be the bread of heaven.

Bill King Artisan Baker

Ballymaloe Cookery School

Green Saffron Spices

Trealy Farm Charcuterie

The Meat Course at Trealy Farm

James Whelan Butchers

Abergavenny Food Festival

Celtic Cook Off

Newport Food Festival

Festive food lessons

Channelling Michel; Roux Jr.

A few days before Christmas, BBC online ran a magazine article with a headline that described sprouts as a “controversial vegetable”.

Now I’m well aware that not everybody actively likes sprouts, but in what possible way are they “controversial”?

I mean, gay marriage is ‘controversial’, but is someone really standing up and saying that sprouts (or a lack thereof) would mean the end of civilisation as we know it?

Personally, I love ’em.

The Other Half was not enamoured – until, in fact, late last year, when I discovered Joël Robuchon’s way to cook them, in a book, coincidentally, that had been a Christmas present from The Other Half himself a year previously.

Prep your sprouts as usual – although there’s no need to do a cross cut on the end of the stalk: it makes no difference – and then soak them in cold water, with a glug of vinegar, for two minutes. Drain and rinse, and blanch for a minute in boiling, salted water.

Stop the cooking process by plunging them in iced water, and then cook in fresh boiling, salted water for 20 minutes, gently, so that the water is just bubbling, but not harshly enough to break up the little “cabbages”, as the great chef himself describes them.

Now you have a choice: you can either drain and serve straight away, or you can decant them into a new bowl of iced water to be dried carefully later, and then finished in butter.

Bread rolls, straight from the oven.

Robuchon says that this process is good for the digestion – well, it certainly seems to reduce the fart factor – but you can see why it would be useful in a restaurant situation too, allowing most prep to be done, with only a tiny amount of cooking to finish.

And of course you can add chestnuts at the same time.

It’s worth noting that the timings are prefect: you end up with sprouts that are lusciously green and properly cooked, but still with texture: none of that ludicrous British idea that al dente means as good as raw.

Well, that was about as organised as I got on Christmas Day.

The night before, I’d started making bread and got it to the first proofing stage before covering it gently with cling film and popping it in the fridge. Remarkably, given how we associate yeast and warmth, this doesn’t stop the proofing process, but merely slows it down.

The next morning, it came out, was thumped around a bit and then left to proof once more.

And here was the biggest mistake of the day: not making breakfast before taking over the kitchen for the main event.

Anyway, the dough was divided into rolls and baked – and came out very well.

Consommé, big on flavour and as clear as it should be.

At the same time, I juiced four oranges, sieved the liquid and then reduced it, adding a touch of salt and very generous amount of pepper on the way, before sieving again and decanting to one of my tiny copper pans to be reheatedlater.

The sprouts were done, as above, and left in iced water.

Now, because I’m not a trained cook, timing is the sort of area where I come unstuck.

We hadn’t risen early – there was no need. But before I knew where I was, we were well into the afternoon.

I gently heated the beef consommé that had been prepared over a number of days previously, and gave it a final, careful pass with folded kitchen paper to remove any remaining dots of fat on the top.

It was good, I must say.

While The Other Half was sipping his in front of the telly, I was sipping mine while bashing on with the next course.

Home-cured salmon.

I’d cured some salmon fillet with roasted fennel seeds, salt, sugar, lemon zest and Noilly Prat – a Bruno Loubet recipe, except that the vermouth replaced Pernod.

Further adjustments saw pickled beetroot diced finely and set on top of thin layers of the fish, with pickled nasturtium seeds from the garden.

There was a salad/garnish of segmented orange and tiny endive leaves, with a simple dressing of olive oil, white wine vinegar, salt and grainy mustard, plus a ‘snow’ of grated, frozen horseradish – and served with the fresh bread.

Now this was also very pleasingly good.

Sending The Other Half out of the kitchen, it was on with the main course.

I’d had some thick parsnip slices cooking gently in butter while we ate the salmon, so simply added the remains of the consommé (in lieu of stock) and let them continue to simmer away.

Then for the duck – at The Other Half’s request, breasts from the south of France, where they breed their ducks big and with a fantastic layer of fat (a foie duck, in other words).

Stephane and Arno at La Bouche had been wonderful in getting them for me – The Other Half is becoming a choosy foodie himself, it seems.

There were two, but they were huge (one remains in the freezer), so I took just one, cross-hatched the skin, salted it and then placed it skin-side down in a searingly hot pan, before draining off the melted fat into my duck fat pot.

It had seven minutes on the skin side, followed by seven further minutes on a lower heat on the flesh side. Then a rest of five minutes, during which I sautéed the sprouts with chopped chestnuts, and prepared the plates.

Now here I was, clearly channelling Michel Roux Jr, with a very nice arc of Balsamico dots in different sizes.

I mean, it looks the business, doesn’t it?

The orange sauce, reheated, was served in individual sauce pots.

The trouble was, by the time we sat down, I was knackered and we had both had the edge taken off our appetites by both the wait for food and the absence of it in the morning.

Dessert – painted chocolate and all.

The food itself was okay – albeit the sauce was a little too peppery and the parsnips, somehow, were a tad undercooked in the centre.

But the biggest disappointment was dessert. In many ways, it was an achievement. I’d managed – at the second attempt – a passable pear bavarois (pear purée mixed into a custard, then into Italian meringue and whipped cream) from Michel Roux’s Desserts.

It tasted good, but next time I need to remember that sieving the purée, no matter how pointless it appears, does make a difference.

My ambition had rather overreached itself, though, as I’d tried a ‘pear three ways’ dish.

What we missed: one of The Other Half's breakfasts.

The jellies of pear liqueur had way too much liqueur – although I was delighted at getting a good set, and getting tiny pieces of fruit ‘floating’ in the jelly.

And the candied pear slices were not crisp enough, because I’d opted to dunk them in icing sugar rather than a coarser type, leading them to become rather most, even after hours in the oven.

Fortunately, the Yule log that I’d made a couple of days earlier was fine.

Still, the point – in part at least – is to learn. Although you don't really want such lessons to be ones handed down over Christmas.

But still, there was nothing ‘controversial’ – and most certainly not the sprouts!

Unheard levels of wrongitude

This is healthier than what he cooks? Really?

Apparently we were wrong. Very wrong. So wrong that it takes wrongness to a whole new level of wrongitude.

Supermarket ready meals are healthier than anything you can make from a book by a TV chef.

See what I mean – how wrong could we be?

Well, that was the headline story across a variety of news outlets yesterday morning, splashed with more relish that Branston could ever produce.

Not, of course, that I would suggest that my brethren in some of the media are less interested in facts than a cheap, sensationalist headline. Oh no.

But while the sensational glee with which some media squealed about TV cooks illustrated the irresponsibility of the same media, it also illustrated the need for enormous care by anyone publishing research, since the research itself, published in the British Medical Journal, was flawed to start with.

First, it seems that the researcher in Newcastle picked a random selection of recipes from the top five cookery books on Amazon in December 2010.

The researcher also picked 100 random ready meals from the UK’s three biggest supermarket chains.

The conclusion is that neither matched World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations for levels of fats, proteins, calories etc – although the chefs’ meals had less salt than the ready meals.

The researcher stuck with WHO recommendations, so he didn’t bother to consider the matter of additives at all, even though you might think that these might well affect health.

As mentioned previously, the traffic light labeling system, which the researcher also used, is inherently flawed, so it follows that sticking with that for such a survey is going to be flawed too.

It’s impossible to discern just what meals and recipes were chosen. Was it like for like – two salads, for instance – or salad versus a bowl of pasta?

If the books were in the charts at Christmas, were they largely concerned with festive food – in which case, hardly everyday eating?

Since one of the books was by a cook who produces primarily desserts and cakes, how was this treated – as comparable with a main course? How many readymade desserts did the researcher find, which still required some preparation (as his report explains)?

The research appears to have missed the point that not everything in the books would have been intended for everyday eating – or even that eating one such meal a day does not mean that you eat three such meals in a day, every day.

If you eat a light breakfast and lunch, then you can still eat a more ‘indulgent’ meal in the evening and be healthy.

In spite of changing opinion and research, the survey also abides with the worn idea that fats in general are to be limited, and saturated fats in particular (this relates to the use of the traffic light system of labeling too and WHO guidelines. Mind, this is the same WHO that only declassified homosexuality from being a ‘disorder’ in 1990, so it doesn’t have a great record on being up to date).

The research also seems to ignore portion size. As I illustrated here, when a ready meal is only 50g more than a normal can of soup – and that’s your main meal of the day – it is not going to fill you up.

You’ll be eating more – possibly in the form of one or more of the snacks and crisps of which the UK consumes more than the rest of Europe out together.

Yet we’re told:

“Practitioners should take care when advising patients on improvements to their diet. Recommendations to cook from scratch rather than eat ready meals needs to be set in the context of detailed nutritional advice.”

Still, the person who wrote it got his MSc in public health and health services research last year, so is doubtless now advising people to eat more ready meals because they’re ‘healthier’.

He either ignored – or perhaps didn’t know – that by 2005, the UK consumed more ready meals than the rest of Europe put together. You’d think we’d be healthier, then, than any other nation, and particularly the French, with all their cream and cheese and natural fats.

Presumably he also imagines that the way forward is to persuade everyone to calculate absolutely every item of food that they stuff joylessly into their mouth to ensure that absolutely nothing deviates even an iota from WHO guidelines and the daft traffic light labeling.

And therein lies the biggest problem.

When, after 26 years, I eventually stopped dieting back in 1999, it was partly because of a realisation of just how joyless the entire issue of food had become: counting every calorie, working out every gram of fat and carbohydrate.

And still putting on weight over time.

Food had become the enemy. Contemplating it was a torture. Eating anything ‘bad’ (butter, for instance) was followed by guilt.

And still the weight went on.

When I stopped dieting and started to learn to enjoy food, and then to cook, an unexpected thing happened. My weight stabilised. Then, a few years ago, it started – very slowly – to fall.

Regular readers here have a few clues about how I eat these days.

I’m a walking illustration of the counterproductive nature of what has been standard diet advice in the UK for 30-odd years. And I am far from unique, even though the tide is slowly turning among doctors.

Apparently the BMJ publishes some light-hearted research in its Christmas edition, but given the crass press furore, didn’t they actually realise that something contradicting the generally-accepted advice that cooking from fresh is better for you than processed food in such a way was bound to attract such sensationalistic headlines?

But whatever the intention, the BMJ has walked into a situation of gifting some media the chance to slate TV cooks and suggest that readymade meals are ‘healthy’. What’s the betting that some of their advertisers will be in dreamland?

And the commentaries continue. In today’s Telegraph, Rowan Pelling was announcing that TV cookery programmes are not for real people to cook from, but are simply a form of porn.

The irony is that high sales of books by TV cooks and chefs may actually indicate that people do want to do more cooking at home.

That fact of UK consumption of ready meals suggests that that is perhaps not happening, but a range of reasons may be at play here.

The general shortage in cooking skills is possibly a factor, as it brings with it a lack of kitchen confidence.

This in turn will mean that cooking things takes longer – or will certainly feel as though it’s longer than a ping meal or ordering a takeaway. And there is a widespread conviction that cooking from fresh just takes too long.

The reality is that food programming is meant to be entertaining. But it can be educational too.

I’ve touched on it before, but this past series of Masterchef: The Professionals alone has shown me how to make a ballotine – and my first attempt was not bad – how to make fondant potatoes (and parsnips work so well too) and how to very simply cook pheasant breasts.

Over the last decade I’ve picked up all sorts of tips and techniques from watching programmes on TV and from books by, among others, by well-known chefs and cooks.

That might, you could be forgiven for imagining, be considered A Good Thing: aspirational, even. Yet Pelling – and others – seem determined to pour scorn on a subject that, quite clearly they know little or nothing about.

Perhaps it’s the shade of that old spirit of Anglo-Saxon puritanism, distrustful of something that might involve ‘too much’ pleasure.

Not that TV cooks aren’t coming in for a kicking from other sources too.

Only last week, environment secretary Owen Paterson suggested that the amount of food that the UK throws away is partly the fault of TV chefs.

He needs to have a word with Pelling then, since she believes nobody ever cooks the recipes of TV chefs.

As various chefs/cooks point out, stupidly conservative use-by dates hardly help, together with that old supermarket ploy of getting people to buy more than they actually need by putting it on special offer.

Only today I heard someone saying that they’d bought double of a particular fresh foodstuff from Tesco because it was on a special offer: if one went off, it didn’t matter.

We throw away vast amounts of bread – how much of that is because it’s utterly crap?

Paterson is right to raise the issue, but the idea that TV chefs and cooks are to blame really is ridiculous.

He suggested that chefs and cooks should pen chapters on using left-overs – as happened in many cookbooks of yore.

On that, he raises an interesting point – possibly without realising it. Education is key.

But should the responsibility for that education be with celebrity chefs?

How about starting such a process in schools, nice and early? How about using such things as Sure Start centres (where they haven’t been closed) to teach parents basic cookery skills?

But that, of course, would mean state intervention. And while, as Paterson shows, the government is quite happy to apportion blame, it is ideologically committed to withdrawing from intervention as much as possible.

Blaming TV chefs is easy. It’s also as idiotic as pretending that TV dinners are healthier than ones made from scratch.

• You can download the full survey here.