Ping! Tea's ready

THERE is a paradox, surely, in the findings of the survey which, the other day, found that hardly anyone is cooking anything any more, but simply bunging ready-made meals in the microwave instead.

Indeed, concomitant with the discovery of this social trend, my neighbour was mystifying me the very same day by saying she and her husband were having a dish called Chicken Ping for tea that night.

"You know," she said, "bung it in the microwave and when it goes 'ping,' it's ready."

And ping's the thing all right, according to this survey, since as many as 60 per cent of housewives now buy convenience foods; even more have microwaves.

The upshot, it seems, is that families are no longer sitting down to eat the same meal together, but rooting individually in the fridge or freezer for different packages of nosh, pinging it and four our of ten folk are then guzzling it in front of the telly.

Yet how does this conclusion square with the fact that the best-selling books are devoted to cookery?

And that, so popular, are cookery programmes on the telly that, as anyone with a satellite dish could testify, it is virtually possible nowadays to watch cuisine being concocted round the clock?

Even these larky and rude magazines that have come out to amuse today's lager-drinking, football-mad, Men-Behaving-Badly young coves have, I am told, recipe sections in them. Why, if all that goes on in our kitchens nowadays is pinging of instant TV dinners, is it that food fads, such as those for sun-dried tomato, pesto sauce and tofu, can spring up from nowhere like they do.

And how is it that if no-one is interested in cooking, TV chefs are huge celebrities?

In fact, the other night when Mrs Leaver and I were out dining with friends at a £50-a-head posh place to celebrate their wedding anniversary, I found myself the envy of the restaurant because its young telly-famed chef - though I'd never heard of him until then - left his pots and pans to come and explain to me the provenance of the cheese on my plate.

(I can't remember where he said it was from, but if its price was a clue, I'd have guessed it was Fort Knox.) However, askance though it may be the way that this column frequently looks at survey findings - remember the ludicrous one a couple of years back that said that the top role model for teenagers was not, as you would expect, someone like Robbie Williams of Take That, but John Major? - in this case, I have to give this one some credence.

For, last year, when Mrs Leaver and I were taking an American housewife, who last visited Britain 25 years ago, around one of our supermarkets, we were struck by her amazement at the number and range of ready-made meals available here.

And this was someone from the country where the TV dinner was invented. We are now evidently out-lazying the Yanks even.

What concerns me, though, is that, for all the interest in cooking on the telly and in glossy recipe books, a generation of future housewives is growing up without getting an education in domestic science in the kitchen from their own mums.

How can they be, when the only culinary skill they are witness to at first-hand nowadays is how to prick the film on some packaged nosh and then "ping" it? This column has already asserted that no spinster should be granted a marriage licence without first producing certificated evidence of talent in such things as suet-pudding construction and spud pie assembly.

And, in the light of this alarming disclosure of wholesale abandonment of the potato peeler and rolling pin, I would refine this condition even more so in the obligatory examinations which must be passed before the wearing of a wedding ring is allowed.

Candidates would lose marks for every minute's delay between the production of such dishes on the table and the husband's arrival home from a day's toil.

For unless some drastic measures are taken - starting with swingeing taxes on all pre-prepared pingable provender, just as the French are proposing to do with fast-food dishes in order to protect their traditional cuisine, or, better still, a ban on wives going out to work so that they can stay in their natural environment, the kitchen - well, the nearest a chap's going to get to a decent dinner any more is watching another bloke make one on the telly.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.