KEY POINTS:
I've said it before and I say it again: there must be a special place in heaven reserved for those men and women who first devised some of our finest foods.
Such as whoever it was who first decided to wrap meat in a pastry crust and thus invented the meat pie, one of the greatest delights of the culinary cornucopia. Was it, perhaps, the same bloke who conceived that pastry rolled round sausage meat would make a wonderful finger food, and came up with the sausage roll?
It was probably an Englishman who first decided that fish would go well fried in a light batter; and I suspect that about the same time a Frenchman first chopped up a spud, deep fried the fragments and created that most marvellous of potato dishes, french fries, commonly known as chips.
I presume it was an Italian who first anointed a certain type of bread with tomato paste, cheese and other delicacies and popped it in an oven to create that delicious offering known as pizza.
Colonel Harland Sanders will be up there, too, gaining his reward for making the world aware of the seasoned succulence of southern fried chicken, particularly when accompanied by mashed spuds swimming in gravy.
No one seems to know just who it was who first placed a mince patty and various other ingredients into a bun and invented the hamburger. At least three Americans are alleged to be the one, but who came first remains a mystery.
Josh Ozersky, online food editor for New York magazine and author of a book soon to be published called Hamburgers: A Cultural History, wrote a month or so ago in the Los Angeles Times that the hamburger was almost certainly invented by Walter Anderson, a Wichita, Kansas, grill cook.
He is believed to have cooked the first hamburgers as we know them today in either 1915 or 16, using standardised, flat mince patties, grilled on a custom griddle and served on identical white buns, creating what was to become America's national sandwich. Bless him.
But the main thing about all of these foods is that they are tasty, nutritious, made with fresh ingredients, readily obtainable day and night and relatively inexpensive. They are not junk foods, neither are they unhealthy foods, and those who label them so are, to say the least, playing with the truth.
Which, of course, is typical of the self-appointed cadres whose sole mission in life appears to be insisting that they know best how the rest of us should, or shouldn't, live our lives.
These days their numbers are legion. They tell us what food we should eat, what cars we should drive, what fuel we should burn. They tell us we mustn't smoke, drink alcohol, use too much water or electricity, smack our children, or spend money, particularly on real estate.
They seem to think that everything they perceive as ailing our society is our fault and are determined to show us the error of our ways.
And when we say, as we've every right to do, "Go and get stuffed", they encourage eager politicians and bureaucrats to pass laws or bring down regulations to coerce us into falling into line with their generally dozy and shallow ideas of how things should be.
If there has ever been a perfect example of that, it's the latest hoo-ha over obesity and the decision to lay down the law to schools about what they can sell in their tuck shops and dining rooms.
The suggestion that certain foods are to blame for obese kids is utterly fatuous. Because it's not the so-called unhealthy foods per se that make kids fat, it's over-indulgence in them. And the answer to that is not to ban such foods, but to educate people on the need for a balanced diet.
As the national director of Family First, Bob McCoskrie, told me the other day, parents are the gatekeepers of the family food supply and are important role models for children's eating behaviour.
Parental attitudes and actions are a key contributor to the obesity epidemic. And, he points out, one of the major problems for families is that so-called healthy foods such as fresh meat, fruit and vegetables are beyond many families' budgets.
In this, as with so many social problems today, those who appoint themselves as the guardians of our society are able to see, and prescribe for, only the symptoms, while blithely ignoring fundamental causes which require much more intelligence and perseverance to deal with.
And, as is usually the case, their misguided and superficial quick-fixes are doomed to fail.
