Too many cooks?

There comes a point, if you eat too much, where you can make yourself feel ill. Not just replete or even a little queasy but really quite sick. We have been stuffing ourselves with celebrity cookbooks for years now. There are, for example, eight compositions currently available from Ainsley Harriot, but he is by no means the most productive. Antony Worrall Thompson boasts many more titles (with another on the way: The Top 100 Recipes from the Food & Drink TV Series, BBC Books, £12.99).

Surely nausea must be imminent? Not at all. The market for celebrity (which simply means television-derived) cookery books is one of the most important in publishing. Last December, the two best-selling books in the country were Happy Days with the Naked Chef and Delia's How To Cook: Book Three. Both were shifting nearly 60,000 copies a week immediately before Christmas.

Admittedly, the cover prices were widely discounted last year - from £20, for the Jamie Oliver, for example, to an average selling price of £12.84, Book Track estimated. But the turnover generated remains tremendous, in publishing terms. In comparison, the Booker Prize is ... well, it's peanuts.

Jamie's first book, The Naked Chef, sold a million copies; his second, The Return of ..., and his third, Happy Days with ..., have both sold some 1.7 million each.

Last year, Jamie was the best-selling cookery writer in the country. The incentive for him to get another product out for Christmas is not too hard to spot. Jamie has delivered - and Penguin has crisply priced the item, Jamie's Kitchen, at £25. The first print run is a cautious 500,000.

There's also a new Nigella, her fourth; a new Rick Stein, his 10th; and a new Delia, her umpteenth. These four will slug it out in the biggest battle of the books this autumn. On the sidelines will be new offerings from the second-league contenders: Madhur Jaffrey, Gary Rhodes and Raymond Blanc. British food culture has become quite absurd. We spend less time in the kitchen and a smaller proportion of our income on food than all of our European neighbours. We lead the Continent in obesity. Yet we also lead the way in celebrity cookbooks. Instead of food being identified by region, these days it's identified by celebrity chef. It is now quite normal, if you go out to eat with other people in London, to be told you're having Nigella's chicken, Jamie's toad-in-the-hole, or the River Cafe lemon tart. It's as if without such an imprimatur, it's scarcely safe to eat.

Of course, many of the cookbooks are never cooked from. The question remains: how can it be that the market is not saturated? There are five million cookbooks by Jamie Oliver, 27, out there, 15 million Delia Smiths. And now that buying them has become an annual ritual, where do last year's go? The answer is simple. There will always be a market for fresh cookbooks, because the old ones go off.