We don’t have the best reputation for cooking but we certainly have an obsession with food.

Every time I turn the TV on there is somebody cooking, demonstrating cookery, teaching somebody else to cook, competing in cookery competitions or celebrity chefs promoting supermarkets.

We have wide chefs, country cooks, open air chefs, la-de-da cooks, bad mouthed chefs and sexy cooks. They all have unlimited funds and time with which to produce their amazingly original recipes which look so easy to accomplish in theory and are almost impossible to attain in practice.

Gordon Ramsay would get a following without food, just by doing his ranting and swearing routine. For Nigella, any accessory would work as well as food for her to ooze and drool over, while Jamie O is so enthusiastic people would be hanging on his every word if he was chucking black beetles into lightly fried cowpats.

Supermarkets now offer ‘ideas cookery cards,’ in case we’ve shoved random products in our trolleys with no idea as to how we might cook and serve them.

Meanwhile the country is heaving with sub standard food served in the pubs, restaurants and fast food joints that need the advice from these chefs and never take it. Still everybody is obviously buying food from them and going home to eat it while watching a superchef programme, so maybe watching good food compensates a bit for eating crap food. Who knows?