Jamie’s the patron saint of my kitchen

And quite some crisis it is, judging by Oliver's shocking new TV series, Jamie's Ministry of Food, which peels the lid off what's really gone wrong with our eating habits. Young mums who feed their kids takeaway every single night of the week, who've never boiled water, whose idea of a square meal is, and I quote: "10 packets of crisps and a giant bar of Galaxy".

One little girl had subsisted all her short life on a greasy diet of chips with cheese and doner kebab, eaten from yellow plastic boxes on the living room floor.

Watching these otherwise intelligent women cringing over a piece of fresh tuna, because they'd never touched raw meat or fish before, and struggling to turn on a hob, was like seeing people woken from a 20-year coma to find that the world has left them behind.

Except modern-day skills and technology were not what baffled them. It was the basic traditions, passed from mother to child, of pancake-making, pasta-boiling and fish-frying.

This shameful situation, where a third generation is now being raised without experiencing cooking as a normal part of family life, is being blamed on class. But it's more complicated than that. I was brought up by a mother whose own impoverished childhood was shaped by rationing in post-war Glasgow, a city not known for its enlightened approach to nutrition. We, in turn, were very poor, with pennies counted out in the grocer for precise numbers of sausages and ounces of cheese. Yet every meal we ate was a balanced one, cooked from scratch.

It's how I cook at home now and I pride myself on being able to create a sit-down dinner from an empty fridge. I have my mother to thank for letting me witness her own ingenuity in a sparsely stocked kitchen.

But for reasons to do with culture, class and, frankly, laziness, that chain of knowledge has snapped. So now countless thousands of British children are facing a future blighted by obesity and myriad other health problems related to bad diet. Their lives will also be devoid of the comfort and joy of eating or cooking proper food.
Jamie Oliver knows how tragic and serious this situation is, which is why his programme is aimed squarely at the policy-makers. Maybe this time they'll have the guts to do something about it.