Only the very best people know how to make beetroot foam

SO, the Masterchef magazine is hitting the dust – the latest casualty in the very long list of wounded or terminally ill publications.

It’s wrong, I know, but I’m quietly happy another cook book (of sorts) is going to God. (As long as people have jobs to go to.)

Just looking at the photos in those glossy mags and books is enough to bring beads of sweat to my brow. Scanning the list of ingredients (pomegranate molasses anyone?) I’ve never made it to the ‘‘method’’ part. A friend once told me the only reason I would ever need the double oven I inherited with our house would be to cook chicken nuggets and chips.

‘‘Nuggets in one oven, chips in the other.’’ Ha, ha.

Maybe he’s right but for my money, the celebrity-style cooking shows and magazines set the bar too high. Far from making good food accessible to the masses, they’ve inspired a new social structure, with people who know how to make beetroot foam at the top and people who buy frozen lasagnes (like me) at the bottom.

I thought the rot was confined to the cities, but it has spread across this great brown land. My dad, a broad-acre farmer in the state’s northeast, told me ‘‘fancy lettuce’’ was the subject of a recent meeting in the tiny town near our farm.

The local primary school, he said, had started a kitchen garden, which had, in turn, led to the covet- ing of lettuce varieties other than iceberg.

‘‘Well, their poor parents can’t keep up now, can they? What, with all the posh eating the kids are carrying on with, normal lettuce isn’t good enough for them any more.’’

So, up on the wheatfields, the natives were revolting, dad said. No more rocket or watercress salad.

Good on ’em. I’ve been revolting for years, as has been my iceberg salad.