Food. Let’s face it, we can’t live without it, whether you’re a keen amateur chef, a reluctant cook who finds recipes mysteriously difficult to translate, a worried mum trying to feed a family on a budget or someone who regards food as merely fuel.

With obesity, especially among youngsters, reportedly on the rise, what you eat or serve up has become an increasingly fraught topic for many.

Last week I overheard a young couple, child in tow, discussing whether it was right or wrong that a school had sent a note home, asking parents not to put Nutella in lunchbox sandwiches. Not because a child in the class had a nut allergy, but on the grounds that it transgressed their healthy eating policy.

I did wonder if the school in question should not be grateful the child had been supplied with a lunch at all, because let’s not kid ourselves, there are schools right here in the county town where children arrive breakfastless and hungry, through either poverty or plain neglect, and stay that way all day.

Don’t get me started on the subject of fussy kids, who will only eat a very few foods. That led to my inventing the Phillips Code on Fussy Eating (basically, if you can name four foods you would refuse to eat at someone else’s house to be polite, you’re fussy – try it).

Going to the other extreme, a colleague once made readers of this paper laugh out loud with her April Fool ‘Trowbridge diet’, featuring lardy cake, pork pies and beer (all at the time made here), and many beer bellies sported by middle-aged men owe a lot to the single man’s diet they once followed. I am surely not the only one to have spotted in supermarket trolleys: a week’s shop consisting of a box of cereal, carton of milk, packet of loo rolls, seven pizzas and numerous cans of lager, cider or bitter.

Equally, the aisles are often blocked up by conscientious people reading the backs of tins and packets, attempting to compare the fat content of one meal over another or spot which brand of baked beans contains the least added sugar.

We are lucky now in Trowbridge to be able to get delicious fresh fruit and veg on our weekly market, which also sells tasty bread, cheeses, olives, fresh fish and cakes. Most of the veg is local, or at least English, though some fruit has racked up food miles (Spanish strawberries, 50p a punnet anyone?) but it’s there, only a healthy walk away.