The case for… Ready meals

At a time when a large a part of our TV and social media diet is based on showing us the “quick and easy” 25-step process behind preparing meals we’ll never make, featuring ingredients with names we can’t be absolutely sure aren’t typefaces, adventurous, serious cookery has never been more in vogue. Few, it seems, choose to celebrate using a microwave to cook something a supermarket has embalmed for us earlier. Personally, I’ve always thought it’s the thing my microwave does best, and consider such snobbery wrongheaded.

If you ever want to see an x-ray of the British soul, look up the sales figures for ready meals. There, in black and white, you will see a love letter that belies all comprehension: 1.8 billion units sold annually, roughly 25 for every inhabitant of the British Isles. Within this, a broad church of offerings, from plasticised bricks of congealed pasta retailing for £2 or less, to farm-fresh cartons of organic produce that can run you over a tenner. As any aficionado knows, the dividing line between great and god-awful is not price, however. The true joy is that the good ones can come from anywhere, as can the bad, adding a slot-machine frisson that comes from not knowing whether you’ve discovered another culinary price-buster or a wet parcel of inedible slime.

They’re not without their drawbacks, of course. We’ve all experienced the fingerprint-annihilating pain of handling a plastic container that’s become deformed by scalding heat. Or resented having to navigate a clingfilm awning that refuses to come off in one easy pull, preferring to striate into thin ribbons of plastic, each now covered in scorching, knuckle-drenching gloop. We don’t let that put us off, however. No. We persevere through the hardship. Some of us take cookery seriously, I guess.