The way we do our hair or make-up alters regularly, but it's unlikely that the stuff in our make-up bag mutates so conspicuously. Cosmetic colours vary, formulas improve, but – generically speaking – the products themselves remain the same.

New Year Honours: Unsung Heroes

Corn buntings gather on a set-aside field near Devizes in Wiltshire.

Ever since we witnessed the dispiriting sight of mothers feeding their children takeaway burgers through the fence on a Jamie Oliver show, school dinners have become political.

Forcing sick and disabled on to the job market

Please excuse me while I have a wry laugh at this news just in: US Congress has a law going through that will allow schools in America to list pizza as a vegetable.

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver called Sarah Palin a Froot Loop for criticising the Obama administration's healthy eating initiatives, and said getting healthy foods to kids is a civil rights issue.

Britons ate 208 million more bags of crisps in 2010 than the year before as the economic downturn led to a more "relaxed" attitude to health, a magazine suggests. Sales of crisps rose 5.7 per cent to 134,622 tonnes, a 7,300-tonne increase on 2009, The Grocer reported.

A council is considering imposing a £1,000 levy on new hot food takeaway shops.

I don't want to be known as a "smug married". Then again, who would? But I'd be lying if I didn't grant myself an inward smile at the news that marriage has been proven to be beneficial to our mental and physical health.

it is with a degree of knowingness that a column about how to be modern should kick off with an object so closely related to the ancient acts of tilling the land, sowing the seed and reaping the harvest. There is, it must be said, an almost biblical simplicity to the idea of the organic vegetable box. Not that it is the likes of us actually doing any of that tilling, sowing and reaping, you understand. That would involve being outdoors in all weathers, putting unnecessary strain on our tender back muscles and the accumulation of dirt under our immaculate fingernails.