I suppose it is food as an art form, rather than as an essential for survival. Which is fine, because art is a welcome extension of all forms of life.

But I am suspicious of the cult of the celebrity chef - and not just because it is at heart a cynical marketing ploy to sell more books and DVDs - because I know only too well that we are being sold on the cult of personality and the fake promise of an aspirational lifestyle.

I used to enjoy some of the output from a couple of TV folk - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall when he first started broadcasting the early River Cottage stuff and would cover a lot of localism and sustainability issues; Dick Strawbridge when he was doing It's Not Easy Being Green and there were lots of practical and useful tips to be picked up.

My childhood friends from back home in Essex have long held the view that in modern Britain healthy food is a middle class issue, and that the rest of the population eat what they can afford. Which usually means a combination of poor quality, highly processed, not widely nutritious and certainly not very fresh foods. But is that really what most people eat?

I'm always amazed at how many people don't have much fresh produce in their fridge or cupboards. Most houses these days lack a cool larder. Many people have quite small fridges compared to some of their pretty huge freezers. From chatting to people, a lot of them seem to shop primarily for frozen foods as their main staple. And I am always stunned when I ask people how often they order out for take away food, and also how often people eat ready meals from supermarkets.

Shopping for quality basic ingredients and preparing meals from scratch is quite rare thing it seems, and I can well understand it, knowing how time-poor most dual-income families can be.

I have a half-formed thought regarding changing gender roles too. Women were the primary shoppers, food preparers, and cooks in the majority of households. Although men can and do cook, they are not socialised to. Mothers were socialised to pass on cookery skills to daughters, not sons. There were always exceptions, but those were the norms in this country for a very long time.

In recent decades, women have increasingly entered paid work and have become time-poor in terms of hours available for domestic work. Men have not filled this gap. Things such as ready meals have become such a large part of supermarket fare because they are successfully marketed at people who still want meals but don't feel that they have the time or knowledge to prepare them from scratch.

So there is still a strong desire for artisanal, aspirational cuisine. I only have to look at the rise of things such as 'Pampered Chef' parties (where the host (agent) invites friends (customers) around for a hopefully impressive meal cooked using utensils that they can then purchase, with the host getting a commission on all sales) to realise that there is a market for selling overpriced cooking tools to (predominantly) women who are impressed by / want to impress with cooking.

And yet the majority of chefs are still male.

Is that because a 'chef' is an aspirational, middle class role catering for perceived finer tastes, whereas the alternative is the more functional 'cook' whose role is to feed the family, and the value of each is perceived quite differently?

I'm rambling and a bit loosely too, but there are plenty of fascinating social issues deeply scored into all of this. Perhaps I should organise my thoughts and turn out a post on this topic, rather than respond in a comment to your post but not quite stay on topic :-)