Britain's diet obsession

This country's relationship with food is problematic. We are in thrall to successive crazes. Professional cooking is debased as light entertainment consumed by an audience gorging on - according to income and taste - fast food, ready meals, takeaways.

These quasi game shows spuriously claim to instruct. That we are bereft of a gastronomic consensus is a truism. We value choice over quality. There is no mainstream, rather a centrifugal clamour of colliding idioms. Variety is our cynosure. We are a nation of faddists. Food in Britain is subject to fashion's caprices.

The notion that what a people eats is as central to its identity as the language it speaks does not apply to us as it does to our neighbours. It can, of course, be argued that we define ourselves through pursuits other than the table and that our culinary Babel is of little moment. But to aver thus is to treat food solely as a matter of taste and to ignore it as a necessity. The essential frivolity of our pursuit of the novel and exotic has grave consequences.

It is not by chance that our abjuration of a settled and healthy diet has been accompanied by an epidemic of obesity and a gamut of eating disorders. We are rapidly catching up with the US, which is the market leader in such diseases - and we realise it.

But instead of adopting the strategy of an everyday repertoire based in the rational management of what we shove into our bodies, we behave like binge drinkers putting ourselves into the self-inflicted rehab of short-term diets devised by a bewildering battalion of chancers with medical qualifications, chancers with no letters after their name, new-age freaks, telly personalities, soi-disant gurus, holistic charlatans, freelance miracle workers, visionary nutritionists, chefs on the make and evangelical former fatties.

As a former fatty I am halfway there; I need only get in touch with my inner prig to qualify as a bossy gastro-tyrant. Indeed my potential has been recognised. In the two and a half years since I shed 100lb, I have lost count of the number of publishers and production companies who have suggested that I write a book or film a series of programmes. The routine presumption is that within every thin man who fought his way out of the fat man there is a diet book. Maybe there is. But I've repeatedly heard myself saying that the book should stay there, within the thin man, covert and unpublished.

I am seldom so reticent. But the sheer surfeit of diet books and products is hardly worth adding to: The Hollywood 48 Hour Miracle Diet; The Beverly Hills Diet; The South Beach Diet; The Paleolithic Prescription and Neanderthin: Eat Like a Caveman and The Paleo Diet (these are particularly pertinent given the similarity of our sedentary lives to those of our hunter-gatherer forbears); Carol Vorderman's Summer Detox and so on.

I have no taste for pseudo-science. Nor for a sub-literary genre which is founded in the exploitation of vanity and which preys on our frailty, and on our perviousness to stale conventions of beauty. The means of dietetic self-improvement take manifold forms, but the ideas behind them are simplistic and invariable: the longing for that beauty, fitness, a protracted lifespan, eternal youth. We pursue these goals in a state of self-delusion. We know they are largely unattainable.

However, this is perhaps to miss the point. The near-addictive behaviour of inveterate dieters suggests that it is the pursuit rather than the attainment of the goal which enjoys an unacknowledged primacy. Dieters lurch from one regime to another just as the religiously deluded flit from one sect to the next, seeking yet never finding. Of course not: for that would be an end to seeking.

It is easy to mock the preposterousness of diets' claims, their authors' greed, the gullible faith of punters - but that's no reason not to mock. The choice of regimes has grown in direct proportion to the choice of foodstuffs whose effects are to be countered. We live in an age of plenty. The boast of efficacy attached to modern diets is desperately concerned to alleviate the potential punter's fear of hardship. A diet which hints at frugality is a non-starter.