Philip Hensher: Take a tip from Heston, Jamie

Two new events appear to display our very peculiar relationship with food. Jamie Oliver's campaigning food programme went to Rotherham to address the under-class's lack of basic food knowledge and skills, turning up mothers who fed their toddlers nothing but kebabs off a van and illiterates somehow surviving on 10 packets of crisps a day.

It was a depressing and even frightening programme to watch. Rotherham is a very decent sort of town which I'm personally pretty fond of, not without its own regional specialities. Yorkshire, from top to bottom, socially speaking, used to be a place very fond of food, and I hope Mr Oliver is going to investigate the wonderful pork butchers of the place. If, of course, they still exist; and to somebody who has always lived off kebabs and crisps, a pork butcher might be as forbidding a place to set foot in as Quo Vadis.

Against this immensely sad account, the publication of Mr Heston Blumenthal's new book had a distinctly Marie-Antoinettish feel. For a start, it costs £100, and is the size of a small desk top. The dishes appear to be in Mr Blumenthal's famously abstruse vein, requiring chemical substances which you are not very likely to find in your local Tesco Metro, and an application of time and equipment which is only appropriate in a professional kitchen.

At first sight, the juxtaposition seems to epitomise how very unnatural the way we think of food is. At one end of the spectrum, Blumenthal's laboratory; at the other, victims of the broken society eating kebabs off the kitchen floor. Mr Oliver is, with admirable devotion, trying to cajole the nation into actually using all those immensely expensive kitchen appliances with simple, fresh, undemanding recipes, and to fill a definite cultural gap.

It would be easy to dismiss Heston Blumenthal as a complete irrelevance. But what, surely, is missing in Mr Oliver's approach is exactly what Blumenthal represents, an idea of culinary fantasy. I don't believe that anyone who seriously enjoys cooking was ever lured into it by the promise that a recipe was simple, no bother, fresh tasting and would only take 10 minutes.

Most people were tempted, in the first instance, by something elaborately showy – in my case, I remember struggling through a really impossibly complicated mushroom sfumato. Simplicity requires a sophisticated cook, and sophisticated eaters.

Every cookbook has recognised this, from Brillat-Savarin's tales of whole oxen reduced to produce a single half-pint of intense stock, to Mrs Beeton's instructions to "first despatch your turtle" and onwards. Elizabeth David found that merely reciting the words "Butter...apricots...garlic" was soothing in the days of rationing, and wrote an (at the time) impossible cookbook to comfort her fellow English cooks.

Culinary fantasy, even if unattainable, acts as a spur to cooking in ways which plain cooking by plain cooks with not much time to spare never will. It needn't be expensive, either; for me, culinary fantasy is much more powerfully embodied by Fergus Henderson's suggestions for unlovely innards – roast spleen! – than by recipes for larks' tongues. A lot of game – pheasant, pigeon, rabbit, even, sometimes, partridge – is a lot cheaper than farmed meat.

Of course, people who have never ventured, culinarily speaking, beyond the nearest fast-food outlets are not going to be culinarily adventurous. But what people trying to encourage home cooking need to understand is that the failure of home eating in this country is not primarily a failure of capacity, but a failure of imagination. They simply don't know what food can be like.

You can, if you like, teach them a recipe for ever-so-easy spaghetti with tomato and basil. Or you can engage their imaginations; Mr Blumenthal, a wonderful exemplar of the power of the imagination with his bacon-and-egg ice-cream, might be as useful a policy tool as anyone.

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