This must be dumbed down at its worst. Food to your door which is neither prepared and cooked (take away) nor specially sourced (organic/local) nor simply prestigious (Harrods.) This is food for idiots. Food comes in portions, ready to cook and with instructions for tasty recipes. You just have to do what it says on the recipe sheet.

A sales rep called on me. Just around when they think I might have been preparing my own dinner. Aha, clever. I’ll be thinking about food. My resistance to silly food ideas will be low. I’ll say yes to anything.

She went through a short questionnaire and asked if I was interested in this brilliant idea. I wasn’t. I battled to stay polite when confronted with this bizarre and illogical offer.

There were silly questions like whether I’d prefer to buy local if food was fresh and at the same price as in a supermarket. Or what my priorities were: value for money or quality. Most were just too silly to answer.

I can see the market the company is trying to target: ‘busy’ Mums who really don’t know how to get good food together without this back to basics guide for idiots.

Haven’t even the most uneducated groups in society always known how to put food on the table?

Now with a population that’s increasingly educated (I write this with doubt lying heavily between the lines) and the sheer flood of books and programmes to guide us through cooking food, we seem even more ignorant. Or at least that’s what this company is hoping.

The philosophy is simple: you don’t even have to find, measure or chop ingredients; someone else does that for you. Can’t we do anything for ourselves any more?

But I suppose I saw this coming. For a few years, I’ve noticed a frightening decline in the culinary expectations of the ordinary citizen. The proof? The selling of hard boiled (and peeled) eggs at Tesco’s deli counter. I can’t even describe my horror.

But then chopped onions and carrots, peeled potatoes and those vile packet sauces in powder form have been around for a long time. Now we’re not expected to cook at all.

And no. Making up a packet of Knorr béchamel sauce is not cooking… One of the biggest concerns is the palate parents are creating in their children. A taste for really quite revolting food which is salty and often has nothing to do with the original ingredients of the dish with that name. It doesn’t even look appetising on the packet! I refer to the recent ads for pasta sauces and I have to say even the pictures on the Eat Fresh promotional material. This isn’t food.

We can’t go back. Despite the efforts, skill and imagination of Jamie Oliver and Delia; sweet Hugh, lovely Mary Berry, James Martin and Master Chef and the scope of chefs with their glorious specialities we can’t hope to interest people in making food for themselves.

No, this isn’t the talk of some high and mighty fast-food abstainer: I have sampled these things. I’ve had sauces from jars and ready meals and even once pre-cut and basted roast potatoes I’m ashamed to say.

And yes, the attack I’m inviting might come from working mothers outraged by the suggestion that they now need to earn money and cook food… Yep, that’s it.

It can be done. And it’s worth doing.

A nation raised on food that has an aftertaste of fabrication and non-edible ingredients is to be avoided. And the sheer satisfaction of making a plate of food for those you love from raw ingredients you’ve chosen and prepared yourself is to be encouraged.

The young and impressionable need to know what real food tastes like. For their health and wellbeing. For their sense of pleasure. For their future.