How to over-egg a home refurb with a £125,000 ‘infinity kitchen’

This country’s obsession with food is becoming deranged. Just 20 years ago, most people simply knocked up some dinner after work.

These days, we seem to think about recipes, ingredients, ‘prepping’ and ‘ plating up’ from the instant we wake. What we eat has somehow acquired the central meaning in our lives.

No one watches religious shows, yet practically the biggest telly audience of the year will tune in to see who can bake the best cake.

The mania has taken such a hold of one couple’s life, featured on Your Home Made Perfect (BBC2), that they converted almost the entire ground floor of their detached house into a kitchen.

When presenter Angela scanlon turned up at their brick- built seventies home in Kent at the start of the project, she found a fridge-freezer the size of a family car in the hallway.

i’ve seen corner shops with smaller cold cabinets.

Both the couple’s children were still small, and husband James (the resident cookery fanatic) was on a diet.

They couldn’t possibly need such a giant fridge — except that we’re now encouraged to believe a house is not a home without eight kinds of lettuce in the salad compartment

and cheeses from every nation. small wonder the UK throws away an estimated £13 billion of uneaten food every year.

Both the architects hired by Angela to reimagine the ground floor were happy to fuel James’s kitchen craving. One design ripped out all the internal walls and installed a breakfast bar the size of the royal yacht.

But that wasn’t nearly extravagant enough.

What James and wife Vicky decided on was an extension that swallowed up the garage and part of the garden, with a kitchen worktop that ran the length of the house and then out through the rear windows and across the patio — an ‘infinity kitchen’.

By the time they’d spent £125,000 on the makeover, there was easily room for a dozen chefs, enough for a medium-sized hotel.

Not once during the hour did anyone suggest it might be nice to have a big sofa where you could put your feet up and snuggle with the kids in front of a movie, or read a book.

Vicky did want a corner where she could keep her beloved vinyl LPs, but the architect proposed storing them above a woodburning stove . . . so music was not exactly the priority.

The big selling point in this series is the computer graphics, with ‘virtual reality’ animations showing us how the conversions could look. But what’s the purpose of all that technology, if all we can think about our stomachs?

in Ben Fogle’s globe-trotting New Lives In The Wild (C5), the selling point is the inspirational glimpse we get into other possibilities — such as the idea last week of a life spent teaching tourists to kite- surf on Peru’s Pacific coast.

sadly, his trip to an artist’s is retreat in the sahara, outside Marrakech in Morocco, was much more melancholy.

The escapee, a hermit in her 60s called Karen, had built a guest house out of mud bricks, with the much younger man she called her soulmate, Yusef.

But Yusef had tragically been killed in a car accident a few months before Ben visited, and Karen was still shattered by shock. The locals found it hard to view her as anything but a rich foreigner, when in reality she was penniless.

To make matter’s worse, though the mercury could hit 50c by day, temperatures at night dropped to below zero.

it all looked desperately hard.