We eat with our egos first, our eyes second and our mouths if we're lucky

There’s plenty of resentment out there regarding the current glut of television cookery. In fact, there’s now a glut of anger surrounding the glut of cookery. I can certainly sympathise with the problem – if you’re not into food then your casual channel-flicking experience must be quite cumbersome. I can only imagine you feel somewhat like I do around the time of the World Cup (bored, itchy and utterly alone).

I, however, can watch television cookery until celeriac puree seeps from my eyes and still I will be ravenous for more. TV food isn’t like real food with its filling, fattening limitations. Not only are there no recommended daily allowances for TV food, you can have French, Italian and Mexican in the same sitting. There are rustic shows, thrifty shows, slutty shows, Asian shows – the possibilities are endless. And in all seriousness, beyond providing entertainment, these programmes have convinced us to pierce less film lids and cook more proper meals.

My only problem with this newly established Foodie Nation, as I shall call it, is that we seem to have forgotten the most important question about food – namely “does this taste nice?”

Masterchef is one of the founding fathers of Foodie Nation. In a typical sequence of this televisual feast, the camera pans to an edible Picasso on a square of grey slate as the creamy vocal reduction of India Fisher tells us that “Antoine has prepared a medley of wild Muskrat entrails on a raft of chiffonaded pak choi, floating in a unicorn bisque and served with a toad jowl coulis.”

Nom-nom, right? To hell with mum’s lasagne and granny’s shepherd’s pie. If its not drowning in pond foam then I’m not eating it any more.

Of course, creativity is a great thing in context. I’m not suggesting that we should be surviving on government-approved hamwiches that arrive simultaneously to every house in Britain through chutes where our ovens used to be. I simply think that the desire to impress with fancy flourishes has overridden our concerns with flavour. A convoy of intense, robust cookery shows has steered our palettes away from the perfectionism of the suburban kitchen and onto the testosterone-laden racetrack of macho competitiveness. The effects of this are no more evident than in that most manly of eateries – the pub.

No longer can I rely on my local to serve a ploughman’s, a bean-burger or a bowl of onion rings . These days, every short order chef wants to be Gordon Ramsay and the menus reflect it. So when, on New Year’s Day, I dragged myself to my nearest boozer for lunch, I was left sorely disappointed. My burger – sorry, my flame-grilled, chickpea, broad bean and pea burger with thick cut chips served on a pretentious wooden board – was dry, tasteless and practically pointless. A simpering plateful of how an upgrade in style is so often undertaken at the expense of substance.

Foodie Nation has undoubtedly hit vegetarians the hardest. Firstly, every chef wants to show off his extensive knowledge of the fact that you can eat anything from pigeon to kangaroo (duh!). Secondly, the gastro menu is smaller and more ‘sophisticated’ than its traditional pub counterpart. Therefore, as a vegetarian, you are likely to be eating ‘the vegetarian option’ which will probably be mushroom fucking risotto again.

It’s not just the pubs that are to blame for declining standards in food. Equally as guilty are the arty cafes of, among other places, East London. In these haunts, it is not the sumptuously worded menus that fool your taste buds but the uber-trendy surroundings. The Independent recently named Brick Lane’s Café 1001 among Britain’s top ten student eateries. I ate there a couple of weeks ago and had no complaints. The food was nice but how wrong can you go with a plastic tub of plain pasta with some cubed feta and rubbery black olives thrown in? It was fine but that was it – no sauce, no seasoning. Hardly some of the best food our nation has to offer.

It seems to me that as soon as we are offered a novel eating concept, whether it be a Masterchef menu or graffiti-splattered walls, our taste buds are lulled into a false sense of security (or patronised into submission) and we make up our minds before a morsel passes our lips.

Shame really.