You can read one before going to sleep at night, with a little light cultural garni if you’re lucky enough to have picked up a Jane Grigson or a Claudia Roden; and you don’t even have to cook it. There are lashings of food – recipes, even – in contemporary anglophone fiction, where novelists are praised as much for the way they describe Malvern pudding and stuffed camel as for their sensitivity and wit. Everybody is watching.We have imposed a further series of oblique takes on food to place it way beyond mere eating It has become a new literature, a new museum, a new movie. We are going for the permanent orgasm that makes food last forever To do this, we have become food-voyeurs. We shoot ice- cream across bellies and drizzle the extra virgin, as slowly as possible, on to the starter as the guests sit down.

1 / FACE/OFF

2 / LA CONFIDENTIAL
3 / THE FULL MONTY4 / WILDE5 / A LIFE LESS ORDINARY6 / THE PEACEMAKER7 / AN AMERICANWEREWOLF IN PARIS8 / SHOOTING FISH9 / HERCULES10 / THE GAME. 1 / I KNOW WHAT YOU… 2 / RED CORNER
3 / DEVIL’S ADVOCATE4 / BOOGIE NIGHTS5 / KISS THE GIRLS6 / SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET7 / FAIRYTALE8 / SWITCHBACK9 / GATTACA10 / IN & OUT. A friend suffering from advanced orgy-withdrawal said that food was the new obsession because it is the

last safe pleasure left -
we can’t have promiscuous sex, she said, we’re not allowed to smoke and we’re not supposed to take drugs. So we eat.She managed to make it sound like much the least rewarding option of the four, and, of course, it’s never been entirely safe; but the fact is that at a moment of cultural uncertainty and a growing, inter-generational stand-off, food has come to be relied on as the one thing getting better all the time.Food is the new alchemy, the new pornography, the new church. Publishers search for the philosopher’s stone of the ultimate, error-free cookbook that will zap all earlier guides.

Food stylists fill magazines with meticulously lit and composed photographs that transmute edible matter into the promise of a more lasting investment: pumpkin becomes amber; the partridge is glazed like a lacquer box; the fennel gleams like jade. We celebrate the cult with Delia the priest and Conran the prophet, and today’s text is: if we get the meal right, it will, like religion, not only give us pleasure but do us spiritual good.At this time of year, there’s a feeling of firelight and candles and sex just off camera, but it’s never going to be, or look, like that on the night; and however much you pay for it, it won’t last long. The great unspoken truth behind the new culture of shopping and stuffing in Britain is that food is a transient pleasure and that what goes in must come out. We think we know better than the French and the Italians, for whom such self-evident truths are not even worth addressing as they immemorially cook, gather and eat. “This is very frightening, I think, all these sad children looking at you…” And the deeply strange, prodigiously gifted, heart-scalded Germanophobic dancing queen fastidiously turns the page, as if to shut off the horrors of her own imagination..