Gastro-porn for the Notting Hill set?
Updated on 25 April 2008
Not necessarily, says Felicity Spector. The growing band of small and local producers could, in fact, be the future of food.
In New York, the authorities have declared a war on fast food - banning trans-fats, and now obliging all outlets to display the full, unexpurgated calorie count right there on their menus.
So you can now see in full technicolour, if you hadn't guessed before, that the deep fried battered onion appetiser at the Outback Steakhouse comes in at more than 2,300 calories.
That's just over the entire daily recommendation for an average woman - and that's before you've even ordered a main course.
Not surprising then, that the backlash is gathering strength.
In London, food lovers, producers and organic enthusiasts have been sampling the very best, in the first Real Food Festival at Earl's Court.
Being precious about organic, or locally produced food might look utterly crass when food riots are breaking out across the developing world because millions can no longer afford the soaring price of basics like wheat and rice.
Producers ranged from the properly upper crust Daylesford Organic, run by Lord and Lady Bamford - to women like Michelle McKenna ("everyone calls me Clippy") who began making jams out of apples and turned it into a thriving small business.
Clippy herself proved a fine ambassador for her brand - all smiles and fizzy hair, held back by the eponymous hairclips, and a great enthusiasm for her product and the ingredients that go into it.
Take a walk around the 500 stalls and it's a theme behind most of the foodstuffs on show: many of them starting with an experiment in someone's kitchen - enthusiasm, along with a passion for ingredients, for keeping things local, authentic, original.
In a way, it's more democratic than elitist: the big sponsors helping to subsidise many of the smaller producers to take part.
And supermarkets like Waitrose are now stocking lines they'd never have considered before, thanks to a 'Local and Regional' strategy across its stores.
Indeed, the renaissance in British cheese making, which began because farmers couldn't manage to sell enough milk, is now such a success that even the French have been over here to learn new skills.
Certainly, at any event like this, there is a degree of food snobbism, a luxury for the middle classes who don't have to rely on cheap supermarkets and what they can afford, or get hold of, rather than what they can choose.
And being precious about organic, or locally produced food might look utterly crass when food riots are breaking out across the developing world because millions can no longer afford the soaring price of basics like wheat and rice.
But then, as Zac Goldsmith pointed out in the festival's main debate, blindly supporting the kind of industrialised agriculture which marginalises farmers and causes unsustainable damage to the land is just plain wrong.
Anything which instead encourages more localised, smaller scale and diverse production ought to be worth supporting.
Professor of Food Policy Tim Lang agrees: there will be new indicators by which we judge food in future.
He predicts: from nutrition and safety to issues like waste, sustainability, and carbon footprints. Because in 30 years time, when the world's population will soar from six to nine billion - there won't be an alternative. There won't be enough land.
So small producers like Clippy McKenna, mixing jams and chutneys at the kitchen table, making cheeses using traditional methods, rearing free range animals without force feeding them GM soya to make them grow faster - this, then, really is the future.
Not just to adorn the tables of Notting Hill's alpha mums, or be photographed like so much gastro-porn in the Sunday supplement magazines.
Good quality food which doesn't harm the planet is surely in everyone's interests.
