Food For Thought: Digging For Supper, Half-Baked Diets, and The Future of Restaurants

With an increased demand for allotments in the UK - a waiting list of up to 40 years in some areas - the government have announced, this week, that they may consider tax incentives to people who allow parts of their land to be used as allotments.

The report also revealed something about The Queen and the Royal Family. And it wasn't that the Queen is secretly an Essex girl, born and bred.

No, the report stated that The Queen owns over 600,000 acres of land. And this statement was included in the report as if someone was trying to drop a hint with a certain Monarch.

It seems that growing vegetables at home or in an allotment is fast becoming the new craze and being hailed as the saviour for the future of food supply. As though it has only just been invented.

There have been flashbacks through history towards the Dig For Victory campaign during the war. Except this time people are Digging for Financial Security, Health Benefits, and for that Global Warming thingy.

It's as though everything's turning full circle. It's 64 years since the end of the Second World War - when tins of Spam were considered to be exotic, and it looks as though people are turning back towards the idea of living off the land.

In a survey carried out in the early '90s, it stated that 58% of people said that they would only garden if they had nothing else to do. When the same survey was carried out this year, it was stated that the figure had now reached 34%. It also stated that there used to be a stigma attached to gardening that it was something old people did.

And it's about to become big business. Many garden centres all over the country are thinking of ideas to get people back into gardening and also growing vegetables.

One of the ideas proposed was to eradicate the Latin names for plants. Probably to avoid the snobbery and the scoffs from the person behind you when you try to pronounce Chrysoplenium glechomaefolium without them turning and laughing in your face when you get it wrong.

Also, some garden centres have even thought about getting rid of the large metal trolleys that are usually common in garden centres. This is likely due to the fact it's difficult to choose what you want to buy when someone who is in a rush to get across to Epilobium anagallidifolium, manages to ram the trolley into the back of your legs.

In a rush to get out, you'll probably just end up panic-buying and leaving a store with a plant that can't be planted in your garden unless it's north-facing, the soil is alkali, the wind's really strong, and you live on the remains of an ancient Indian burial ground.

Even if you do manage to plant it, it will either grow into a small pathetic-looking stick or it will grow into something so large that it's determined to make its way towards your satellite dish and turn off the signal during the opening credits of East End Coronation Farm.

It used to be thought that all plants grow towards the sun, until it was proven as a law of physics that all plants actually grow towards the nearest satellite dish.

But something else that was said this week was that people who do grow their vegetables at home often end up not eating them. The report says that people find they just don't taste as nice as store-bought produce.

The only good thing about growing vegetables at home is that there's a small chance that something that you grow, like a marrow, may just turn out to look like Winston Churchill. Then you could go to the local newspaper and, if it's a newspaper in an area where nothing much happens, you may just make the front page.

Food is always an interesting topic. There's much conflicting information regarding food going around and it's difficult to know what's true and what isn't.

Although, it does look as though the way we get our food is going to have to change. Intensive farming and produce pumped full of chemicals looks as though it's the way we're going to have to go in order to feed everyone in some years down the line. So we may just have to grow our own food.

While at the moment in the western world we can get food almost anywhere apart from commercial airlines and hospitals, there'll be a time in the future when that probably won't be the case.

And everything these days seems to come with a vegetarian option. Quorn or soya.

In fact, there was another report out this week (where would we be without them?) that said that while the sales of soya and quorn are on the increase, 74% of those people who were asked said they had no idea what quorn or soya actually was.

Little did they know that quorn is a protein-based product made from fungus and egg white, and soya is made from grinding the bones of witches under a full moon and then heating them to 200 degrees until a paste is formed. Add sugar to taste. Serves 4.

And these meat substitutes are supposed to be a tasty alternative to meat. In the same way you can convince yourself that rice cakes are a tasty alternative to crisps. When they really taste like polystyrene. Only less filling.

We're in an age obsessed with food and eating as much varieties of it as we can find. If the media isn't full of lots of new foods to try with cooking programmes cropping up every day of the week, then there's the government telling people to stop eating too much sugar or saturated fat.

Whether it's the government or a charity or a diet agency that's telling everyone to lose weight, it's all over the screens and all over the leaflets.

Even during the recession, the diet industry is becoming more and more profitable.

Once upon a time, thousands of years ago, there was only one theory for not getting fat. It was revolutionary for the time. The theory was called 'Don't Eat Too Much'. The only problem was that it was carved into a gigantic stone and therefore it didn't sell very well because no one could lift it.

Then, many years later in 1850, a man named Dr Fred Calorie came up with a revolutionary idea after realising he was bursting out of his trousers. His idea was to come up with a system in which people lost weight by following a set of guidelines. Fred Calorie invented a single scientific unit that could be used to measure how much food someone was eating in a day in proportion to the type of food. Those units became world famous and were named, in honour of their discoverer, as 'Freds'.

Or something like that.

Then the whole world's dieting program was based around this. It was very simple and it basically meant that anything that tastes nice, you were not allowed to eat.

And anything that tastes nice means it's full of fat.

That's why we eat chips and pies and crisps. And hamburgers - because they are from cows and cows are fat. I promise you'll never see a cow using a rowing machine.

And it's for the same reason that we don't eat ants - because ants appear to have very little fat so we leave them to the birds.

And the birds leave the hamburgers to us because, due to an unfortunate design flaw, birds cannot use the drive-through at McDonalds.

Also, it was confirmed this week that many up-market restaurants have had to close during the recession. Eating out is said to be one of the first things that people turned away from when money was tight.

The Recession Guide to Restaurants:

1) If the word 'cuisine' is used in the menu, the main course is about the size of a mouthful of food. They call it À la carte, it costs about £99.99 and you'll go home hungry. Unless you stop for fish and chips on the way back.

3) If the word 'eats' is used, it will be very cheap. But the money spent on prescriptions for antibiotics and diarrhoea medication will be high.

Also, last week, a new fast food lobster restaurant opened in London.

Usually anything that sounds or looks terrible probably is. Except for lobsters. People only eat lobsters because they're ugly. You wouldn't imagine going into a restaurant and having to choose a puppy from the pen in the corner before sending it into the kitchen to be dropped into a pan of boiling water while it's still alive. But if it's something like an ugly lobster, that's no problem.

Many restaurants are trying new things in order to beat the recession. Fast food venues are beginning to exploit the failure of the up-market restaurants. The only problem with that however, is that many restaurants are trying to be something they're not. They're trying to outdo the competition by giving the customer more choice and trying to introduce new types of food.

Going to a drive-through at a fast food restaurant in the future is set be a nightmare.

'May I take your order please?'

'Er...yes. I'll have the Cylindrical Drinking Vessel Filled with Nature's Clear, Odourless, Extra-wet liquid. And for my meal I think I'll have the pizza. With no toppings. Oh, and hold the cheese. I'll wash that down with a glass of the house soya milk and then, for my main, I think I'll have the toast, medium rare please, with the Grilled Panda Groin and a side of Sautéed Bat's Nipples.'

'Would you like rice cakes with that?'

'Oh, yes please. And a diet Coke.'