as if Mondays weren't already full of a vague guilt, this week kicked off with the rather sobering news that Irish people are eating more and more convenience food. According to Teagasc, the food research agency, sales of ready-to-eat meals are rocketing, and "microwaveablity" is the single biggest factor affecting people's decision to buy them. The report seems to suggest that for many people, dinner is now a laborious process which involves sticking a disposable plastic dish in the microwave, defrosting it, heating it and eating it, with ne'er a raw ingredient or a dirty saucepan in sight.
I'm hardly surprised because my own dinners are all too often made in exactly this fashion. The folks at Marks & Spencer probably know more about my feeding patterns than I do myself ("And if I'm not mistaken John, I think we'll see East heading straight for the salad section after dithering between the cauliflower cheese and the basil mash . . . And yes, there she goes."). At least once a week, I go to the supermarket and indulge in the modern equivalent of hunting-gathering: browsing-freezing. Armed with a basket, I cruise the aisles, deliberating over which ethnic group I'll deign to dine with, and checking on the percentage of balsamic vinegar, "fresh" parmesan and GM foods present in each perfectly packaged supper.
What I won't do during these expeditions to stock up the freezer, is allow myself to feel guilty about the fact that I could easily make these dishes myself. I'm obviously more a child of the 1980s than I thought because I find myself trotting out all the cliches of that era. "I've worked hard. I deserve it. Time is money," I mutter, as though I was hard at work in the City all day and was trying to justify another Lamborghini or a £400 dinner in Le Caprice.
Rather reassuringly, I'm obviously not alone in my double-thinking over the freezer cabinet. Teagasc found that most consumers thought these products were expensive but bought them on a weekly basis anyway, and also thought that chilled meals were probably better quality than frozen ones, but yet bought more frozen food than chilled. So we're all at it then - opting for convenience food, feeling bad about it and buying it anyway.
Interestingly, the rise in sales of convenience food coincides with the phenomenal increase in popularity of the type of highly-packaged, back-to-basics, cookery books and programmes, like those written and presented by Nigel Slater, Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver. Cookbooks and television cookery programmes always used to be aimed at slightly bored hausfraus, who presumably swapped recipes for duck a l'orange at Tupperware parties, coffee mornings or suburban wife-swapping evenings. It's not that cookery wasn't sophisticated - those interested in cookery knew that cordon bleu was not pronounced "gordon blue" - but it was a subject for young marrieds or the middle-aged and not for the young.
Then came the revolution, when the huge popularity of Nigel Slater's newspaper column and subsequent books demonstrated that there was a whole tranche of society, much of it young and single, who were interested in eating well at home. These were not people who wanted to perform minor kitchen miracles involving pancetta and twice-cooked anything; and nor were they interested in the kind of handy, "Ten ways with left-over lamb" type tips of yesteryear.
These were people who ate out a lot and who knew what quality food tasted like, but who had grown up without the skills to replicate it at home. Reared at a time when potato waffles, Iced Magic sauce and chicken nuggets were objects of desire, this was a generation which longed for a culinary past it never had, a past where comfort came in the form of mashed potatoes, sausages, roast lamb and green beans. It's no coincidence that the books of the new generation are called things like Real Food (Nigel Slater) and How to Eat (Nigella Lawson), and the television programmes are like those of Jamie Oliver, full of a determination to de-mystify the art of cooking. Even the old buddha of suburbia, Delia Smith, got in on the act and made a series of back-to-basics television programmes and books called simply How to Cook.
The new recipes are for food that is basic but tasty and their writers sold themselves as people like you and me - busy, trendy, unfussy but demanding. Their books and programmes are hugely popular here as well as in Britain - the new Jamie Oliver cookbook has sold in excess of 15,000 copies in Ireland since its launch less than three months ago. Yet this was also the period in which sales of ready meals soared through the roof. It doesn't really add up.
One possibility is that those buying the convenience meals aren't the same people as those buying all these cookbooks, but it seems to me that my fellow browsers at the freezer cabinets are exactly the kind of people at which the new cookbooks are aimed - young, trendy, busy, probably living in a flat, and single or without kids. Further evidence that ready meals and the new cookbooks are targeting the same constituencies lies in the kind of dishes the big manufacturers are offering, which are very similar to those made by Slater et al - chicken marinated in honey mustard, parsnip mash, lightly steamed comfort served up with home-style ease.
It makes you wonder just how many people who buy the cookbooks actually make any of the recipes with any regularity. Both my mother and I have a shelf of cookbooks but whereas mine are glossy, full of photos and quite immaculate, those of my mother are gloomier tomes with black and white photography, covered in splashes of sauce, a dusting of flour and impromptu bookmarks - palimpsests of every meal she ever made, enjoyed and forgot. While the new cooks give us a whole new lexicon of real food, comfort eating and ease of preparation, they can't possibly give us the time and concentration with which to make them.
Of course it's an easy matter to toss some wild mushrooms in good Ligurian olive oil and then serve them simply on fresh country bread, but that's not much good when my local shop can't muster more than button mushrooms, Flora and sliced pan. Even when I do indulge in some serious gourmet shopping at the weekend, I often have neither the time nor the inclination to make something I will eat by myself.
I have all the yearnings and snobberies of a fully-fledged foodie without the lifestyle to match it, so instead I read my books, devouring descriptions of roast garlic and braised fennel and drooling over pictures of cod baked in salt. It's a kind of very polite culinary pornography, and like spiritual pornography (reading endless self-help books and not following any of them), interiors pornography (having a subscription to Wallpaper* magazine and a flat painted by the previous owners) and travel pornography (buying Lonely Planet guides and booking Magaluf), it can be indulged in by everyone in the comfort of your own home. If you keep quiet about it, you can even do it while eating a guilty TV dinner from M&S. I won't tell if you won't.