"We went to Calcutta last year and a team of emaciated chefs cooked us up a five-course banquet with wine . . .and all for the equivalent of about 25! Of course that's a week's wages for them."

"You were lucky. I happened to be in Lebanon when the Israelis invaded. All the restaurants were closed. I went for days without being served anything on a bed of anything."

"That's nothing. I was in Sudan during the famine. It was terrible: you couldn't get a cantaloupe sorbet for love nor money."

From Our Own Correspondent (BBC World Service) last week featured an item by food writer Fuchsia (yes, Fuchsia) Dunlop. This was in the week that Zheng Xiaoyu, the man responsible for ensuring the safety of food and medicine in China, was executed for accepting bribes.

Having spent a decade in China researching and writing about the cuisine, Dunlop is now finding things are starting to taste a bit off. But it's not the arbitrary executions, or the torture of prisoners, or the one-child policy, or the treatment of dissenters, or the annihilation of Tibet that have spoiled Dunlop's appetite. It's the pollution. She's afraid Chinese food has become a little too tainted, at least as far as the tender western belly is concerned.

"Last autumn, I was in Suzhou for the hairy crab season, " she said. "I revelled in the taste of this fabled delicacy, its sweet flesh dipped in ginger vinegar, until I read in the papers that many farmed crabs were tainted with a cancer-causing antibiotic. And then I looked into the waters of one lakeside farm and saw a swirl of oily scum and muck."

She did point out that while contaminated food is an international problem, "in China the media is state-controlled, environmental activists are routinely harassed and corruption is endemic". She said the government had tried to cover up a World Bank finding that 700,000 people die every year in China because of air and water pollution. Now, she said, the "banquets that once seemed a glorious perk of my job have begun to feel like an occupational hazard". Pity about you.

Irish comedian Dara O Briain was one of the panellists on the first episode of the new series of BBC Radio 4's Just a Minute and was as effortlessly funny as ever. There was a sudden temptation to root for him in a pathetic, ole-ole kind of way. He didn't win though. Paul Merton, king of the comedy quiz show, did; Merton wins everything.

In case you haven't heard the show (though that's unlikely, as it's been running for 35 years), the contestants have to speak for 60 seconds on a given topic without hesitation, deviation or repetition.

O Briain lasted only a few seconds on the subject of the 'Dirty Laugh' before getting himself into a knot over the word "coruscating". He was challenged by actress Maureen Lipman. "I question the word carcazing, " she said.

"That wasn't the word I intended to say at the start, " admitted O Briain. "But midway through I thought, 'If I stop now they'll get me for hesitation.

Better to create an entirely new language.'" Host Nicholas Parsons allowed the challenge "for deviation from the English language as we understand it" and so O Briain lost the point but kept his appeal as Britain's ideal dinner-party guest du jour.