Now then children, eat up your sushi

So how did you celebrate National School Meals week? Did you throw an ironic little dinner party of braised liver and semolina? Restaurateur and cookery guru Prue Leith marked the occasion last Tuesday with an address to the Royal Society of Arts, arguing that children as young as five should be taught that they would find cookery "satisfying, creative and fun".

And who could argue with that? Surely all right-thinking people like nothing better than to dash home from work and rustle up a monkfish ceviche with smoked baby onion marmalade? Britain is a nation of born-again foodies. Supermarkets now sell such a bewildering array of imported goodies that Channel 4 has a series explaining what the hell to do with that jar of olive paste you bought by mistake. Prime-time television has become a non-stop Open University course in spending more time in the kitchen.

Once upon a time anyone who could run to a cook avoided the kitchen altogether. But the last war finally rendered the "Servant Problem" insoluble; anyone wanting to eat fashionably was obliged to slave over Good Housekeeping's chicken supreme and croquette potatoes. Now, after this interregnum of drudgery, the cook and kitchen maid have been replaced by Marks & Spencer and the dishwasher. And what happens? No sooner does the food industry free us from the treadmill of daily food preparation than we hunt for fresh means of enslavement and start smoking our own fish.

Or do we? There is certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that Britain is cooking up a storm: recipe bookshelves are expanding like yeast; stainless steel balti dishes are big business; newsagents are packed with culinary porn promising 101 Winning Ways with dried salt cod. But how does one square all this with the fact that we eat more fast food than any other European country? With the fact that Bella magazine's readers spend barely an hour a day in the kitchen? Maybe the boom in culinary paraphernalia tells us as much about British eating habits as the expensive tennis racket under my bed tells you about my level of personal fitness.

Of course, much of this Epicurean voyeurism is confined to the sushi- rolling classes. Prue Leith's back-to-basics mission was directed at the children of families who eat exclusively from polystyrene containers. Understandably depressed by the idea of a whole generation that will never know how to grill a chop or mash a potato, she and her fellow cooks invited a London primary school class to the Royal Society of Arts to introduce them to the simple pleasures of food preparation. They got the assembled children to knock up the Nineties' answer to the scotch egg: spinach and ricotta strudels for 200 people. Very useful.

Shimmering below the surface of Leith's modest proposal that making pasta from scratch should be part of the curriculum was the perennial foodie assumption: slow food good, fast food bad. In reality, it is not the pizzas and burgers that are unhealthy but that not enough fruit and veg are eaten with them. As long as what people eat is tasty, affordable and nutritious, the amount of time spent folding in the ingredients is an irrelevance. For anyone to spend more hours a day on the basic business of ingestion than they do reading books, talking to their friends and families or making love is ludicrous. Occasional cooking is one thing, but unless you get a genuine thrill out of it, slaving over ricotta strudels on a daily basis is a waste of precious time, and more and more people are having the sense to realise it.