I do wish our public health bodies would stop treating us all like kids. On Christmas Day, the Food Standards Agency was tweeting festive food poisoning ‘tips’ - “Before you sit down for the Queen’s speech remember to chill or freeze your leftovers” - illustrated by infantile cartoons. That’s duff advice: food needs to cool thoroughly before it goes into the fridge, and lots of refrigerated leftovers can be safely eaten for a week or so, providing they are properly reheated.

Yet misleading FSA homilies stream from this quango staffed by people who show no instinctive feel for food, and who appear to fear it - the sort who consider a meal deal consisting of a low fat sandwich, crisps and diet drink to be responsible eating.

“The Westminster test case is a significant victory for common sense”

The same story applies to the environmental health establishment. It’s only a matter of time until yuletide ‘chestnuts roasting on a open fire’ become a no-no as jobsworth inspectors require that we submit a full HACCP plan for the procedure, while the FSA chimes in scarily about the dire consequences of eating partially cooked nuts.

I was delighted to read that because it was unable to submit any evidence that the practice is unsafe, Westminster Council failed to prosecute Davy’s restaurant in London for serving rare burgers. The council had been insisting burgers must either be cooked to a core temperature of 70C for two minutes (grey and tough), or made, absurdly wastefully, from whole pieces of meat seared to kill any external bugs, and then with the cooked edges shaved off before mincing.

The Westminster test case is a significant victory for common sense, real food and cooking, but there are many battles still to be won. Why, for instance, is the FSA still wittering on about the ‘risk’ of raw milk? No-one has been poisoned by it in a decade. Why should the age-old recipe for Stilton be altered to oblige the salt reduction lobby? Where’s the evidence it raises blood pressure?

Year round, health and safety bureaucrats mount attacks on small-scale foods of sound provenance, yet remain more or less mute about the dangers of factory-farmed processed food, antibiotic resistance, pesticide residues and GM feed contamination. Whose side are they on?

Joanna Blythman is a journalist and author of What to Eat

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