Cooking is for ego-maniacs ... just look at MasterChef

I’VE been watching the ubiquitous MasterChef as a form of self-harm: I shout at the screen every time a contestant boils a lobster, or frazzles a cow cheek. And I rail at the female contestants with scarves knotted in their hair, who go on and on about how they ‘cook for the family’ and have left newborn infants at home in a drawer to take part.

Passive-aggressive nightmares all, I bet their husbands are so grateful these pinnied, mumsy, bossyboots are on telly, away from home so they get to eat ready meals, without having to exclaim every five seconds to their martyred mates how delicious everything is, knowing they will have to wash up afterwards, a task surely harder than chopping a few stalks of coriander and frying a bit of hormone-addled flesh in the Le Creuset.

The male contestants are as bad: they take their aggression out on various small creatures, thinking that by wielding carving knives and sous vides they are somehow asserting their masculinity, whereas in fact they are ego maniacs, the type of men who in bed will always ask a woman for praise and marks out ten.

I hate to see hosts John Torode and Greg Wallace masticating, stuffing goo into their open maws like two French geese. I’d love to see either one keel over mid-broadcast. People who are into cooking are the worst souls on earth, constantly in search of praise, dominating the poor sods who live with them with overcomplicated dishes we never wanted to eat in the first place.

Having watched MasterChef last week, sandwiched around Back In Time For Dinner on BBC2, hosted by the deliciously sardonic Giles Coren, which last week revisited the 1970s, I realised that the kitchen has imprisoned us again.

Whereas in the 1970s we had Vesta chow mein, now we are all supposed to cook everything from scratch. Who can be bothered, frankly?

NEVER forget that all this cooking involves huge amounts of shopping – the lugging of carrier bags in our lunch hours, which invariably falls to women. The revelation that shocked me in Coren’s show was how drastically our spending on food as a proportion of earnings has dropped in the last half century, from a third in the 1950s to 12 per cent today.

This is something we should be ashamed of, surely?

I’m quite proud to say I pos- sess neither an oven nor a bag of flour. I’ve never made a cake.

The great appeal of my general lack of interest in food is it frees up so much time; it simplifies life.

I am proud to have never cooked meat and two veg for a man, or a family. The only time I ever ate three square meals a day was in the Northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, where the locals do not even eat eggs, and have only small open wood fires to cook upon. Food is picked and on the plate within 15 minutes.

These people are good looking, intelligent, peace loving: the antithesis of the likes of Gordon Ramsay (when he cooked for me, the only non-murderous dish he could come up with was braised Little Gem lettuce in garlic) and MasterChef winner Thomasina Miers, who likes to cut the paws off squirrels.

Give me the dewy-skinned Deliciously Ella Woodward any day; she must be given her own raw, vegan, gluten-free series soon. tomatoes, rocket, goat’s cheese, you name it, the very sweet staff – after a small glitch, when they suggested trout – rallied and produced a delicious dinner that was surprisingly cheap (£13.50 for a green vegetable risotto).

The only problem was my satnav lady’s announcement, when I hove near, having crossed the moor: ‘Prepare to park and proceed on foot. The last section of this route requires walking.’ Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.