Anyone else long for those days back? When cooking a family meal was an uncomplicated daily affair undertaken by one member of the family ('Mum') who would put up a reliable, if slightly unadventurous menu until Dad snapped and ordered in a Chinese. Why did it all have to change? Why did what we eat have to become such a complicated business? Deciding what to have for dinner has become a daily stress. It should be organic, of course, and the latest fad, 'in season'. (Lamb chops? At this time of year? Have you gone MAD! ) Every magazine we open is assailing us with bossy TV chefs telling us what we should and shouldn't be eating and when we should or shouldn't be eating it.

Rhubarb, 'game', all kinds of unpleasant sounding offal-type things. Day and night we should all be out foraging for mushrooms and gathering up elderflowers and crabapples and sloeberries. They say:

take a kilogram of 'sloeberries' as if they were advising you to put the kettle on. What are 'sloeberries' would anyone mind telling me, and while we are at it you might look up the following "seasonal produce" which one Sunday supplement chef (hairy Englishman . . . not our own lovely Rachel) suggested we stock up on for the month of November:

cardoons, borecole, kohlrabi, salsify, scorzonera, wood blewits, pleurottes and wait-for-it f hedgehog fungus. Delicious. He also suggested we rush out and purchase artichokes, grey squirrel, mallard, nettle, sloes, rosehips and quince. Quick . . . before Dunnes runs out of squirrel! Swede and turnips are also in season. And cod and goose . . . so it's not all bad news for November if you were planning on cooking and eating something.

Eating seems to have become yet another thing which we are all aspiring to do 'properly'. So that those of us who regularly plop fish fingers and oven chips in front of our child and who proudly serve our husbands for the third time this week with a dish which they foolishly professed their 'favourite' (lasagne in this house), as they smile weakly in reluctant thanks, feel as if we are failing.

It has become a complicated minefield of moral and social issues . . . leaking into other areas like social and sexual politics. Men do all the cooking on telly, why aren't they doing it at home? Am I a bad mother because my child will only eat "real" things that are white . . .

rice, pasta and chips basically, oh and chicken . . . sometimes, if it's processed into the shape of a cartoon character he likes first.

My sister is the editor of a posh food magazine (olive . . . it's great, buy it) and identifies herself as that new breed of person . . . a 'foodie'. A 'foodie' is someone who 'loves food'.

Not to be confused with a 'fattie' who is someone who also loves food so much that they eat too much of it.

She eats seasonally, and organically.

She cannot tolerate incorrectly made coffee . . . and while she is, spiritually, a food snob, occasionally she is big enough to admit that my Lidl 100% Arabica coffee is "not bad, " once served in the correct way, you understand. She is a challenging house guest, but an educational one. (Boiled water left to stand for two minutes, warm pot, add coffee then water, and brew for four minutes before plunging. ) This week there were frantic emails to and from the UK as my two sisters and I are planning a dinner in London. French? Portuguese?

Gastro pub? Sardinian? We settled on a Japanese near where she lives . . . the sushi is excellent but the service "patchy" so the other sister might get a bit fractious. She hates bad service. Whilst weighing up one sister's bad waitress stare against my own passion for sushi (which the county of Mayo has, sadly, yet to satisfy) it occurred to me that half of the world is starving while the other half is becoming pickier. Still, it's quite terrifying how quickly one can banish that thought when you've got a London restaurant to book. As Marie Antoinette would have said were she alive today: "It's November . . . let them gather quince."