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I have a confession to make, and here is as good a place as any to announce my shame to the world. Here we go. I have never eaten a Findus Crispy Pancake. But I have always wanted to try one.

Which one of those two sentences constitutes the shameful admission depends on what decade you grew up in.

Alex’ post on Thursday got me thinking, as often happens, about ready meals. I like ready meals. I think there’s a case for them, because while I love cooking, I have a job, and sometimes I just want to eat something, soon please, and without generating another sinkload of washing up.

But they have a lot to answer for.

I used to work for Northern Foods, so I feel partly responsible. Horrendous organization; a vast, Kafkaesque bureaucracy full of smug, patronizing businesspeople. They were horrible to me and I’m pretty sure I responded in kind. I worked in Company Secretarial on the corporate side, which is still no excuse for the fact that no one there knew damn-all about food.

As if to prove this, their website smugly brags that they invented the first ready meal, like that’s something to be proud of. They lie, because prepackaged dinners have been around since the 1940s, but since this is something we can blame Northern Foods for, let’s take them at their word for now.

(Bitter? Me? Never.)

When those chillis con carne hit the shelves of M&S, that was the day the rot set in. Slowly at first, but with increasing rapidity throughout the seventies and eighties, people stopped cooking, because they didn’t have to any more. Fast forward thirty years and you have an entire generation for whom the art of making food is a strange and alien pursuit, practiced only by effete wankers on television.

Cooking is easy. You take some ingredients and make them hot. Then they’re cooked, and you’ve turned ingredients into food.

Worse yet, we get towns like Rotherham, which, I’m told, is populated entirely by fat working-class people who live entirely on kebabs. Worse even than that, it takes the Mockney Prat to go to Rotherham and show them that cooking is easy. Thus do we perpetuate the stereotype that cooking is practiced only by effete wankers on television.

More even worser that that, it gives Jamie the impression that he’s some sort of messiah. “I’m just that geezer who keeps doing these worthy things around the country”, says he, apparently without a trace of irony. Perhaps the intention is for him to swell his head to such an extent that his tongue finally fits in it.

Who’d have thought that I could work a reference to Jamie Oliver in there? I don’t have issues, not really, but he’s such an easy target. I promise that subsequent blog entries will attack a broader range of villains.

However, we do have an episode all about Jamie coming up next week, so I might have to talk about him a bit more yet.