This country's relationship with food is problematic. We are in thrall to successive crazes. Professional cooking is debased as light entertainment consumed by an audience gorging on - according to income and taste - fast food, ready meals, takeaways.

These quasi game shows spuriously claim to instruct. That we are bereft of a gastronomic consensus is a truism. We value choice over quality. There is no mainstream, rather a centrifugal clamour of colliding idioms. Variety is our cynosure. We are a nation of faddists. Food in Britain is subject to fashion's caprices.

The notion that what a people eats is as central to its identity as the language it speaks does not apply to us as it does to our neighbours. It can, of course, be argued that we define ourselves through pursuits other than the table and that our culinary Babel is of little moment. But to aver thus is to treat food solely as a matter of taste and to ignore it as a necessity. The essential frivolity of our pursuit of the novel and exotic has grave consequences.

It is not by chance that our abjuration of a settled and healthy diet has been accompanied by an epidemic of obesity and a gamut of eating disorders. We are rapidly catching up with the US, which is the market leader in such diseases - and we realise it.

But instead of adopting the strategy of an everyday repertoire based in the rational management of what we shove into our bodies, we behave like binge drinkers putting ourselves into the self-inflicted rehab of short-term diets devised by a bewildering battalion of chancers with medical qualifications, chancers with no letters after their name, new-age freaks, telly personalities, soi-disant gurus, holistic charlatans, freelance miracle workers, visionary nutritionists, chefs on the make and evangelical former fatties.

As a former fatty I am halfway there; I need only get in touch with my inner prig to qualify as a bossy gastro-tyrant. Indeed my potential has been recognised. In the two and a half years since I shed 100lb, I have lost count of the number of publishers and production companies who have suggested that I write a book or film a series of programmes. The routine presumption is that within every thin man who fought his way out of the fat man there is a diet book. Maybe there is. But I've repeatedly heard myself saying that the book should stay there, within the thin man, covert and unpublished.

I am seldom so reticent. But the sheer surfeit of diet books and products is hardly worth adding to: The Hollywood 48 Hour Miracle Diet; The Beverly Hills Diet; The South Beach Diet; The Paleolithic Prescription and Neanderthin: Eat Like a Caveman and The Paleo Diet (these are particularly pertinent given the similarity of our sedentary lives to those of our hunter-gatherer forbears); Carol Vorderman's Summer Detox and so on.

I have no taste for pseudo-science. Nor for a sub-literary genre which is founded in the exploitation of vanity and which preys on our frailty, and on our perviousness to stale conventions of beauty. The means of dietetic self-improvement take manifold forms, but the ideas behind them are simplistic and invariable: the longing for that beauty, fitness, a protracted lifespan, eternal youth. We pursue these goals in a state of self-delusion. We know they are largely unattainable.

However, this is perhaps to miss the point. The near-addictive behaviour of inveterate dieters suggests that it is the pursuit rather than the attainment of the goal which enjoys an unacknowledged primacy. Dieters lurch from one regime to another just as the religiously deluded flit from one sect to the next, seeking yet never finding. Of course not: for that would be an end to seeking.

It is easy to mock the preposterousness of diets' claims, their authors' greed, the gullible faith of punters - but that's no reason not to mock. The choice of regimes has grown in direct proportion to the choice of foodstuffs whose effects are to be countered. We live in an age of plenty. The boast of efficacy attached to modern diets is desperately concerned to alleviate the potential punter's fear of hardship. A diet which hints at frugality is a non-starter.

A palate which has never known anything but constant variety is not liable to willingly respond to a culinary repertoire composed of exclusively, say, grapefruit and eggs or white fish and spinach. Such diets may work on the body. They do not, though, appeal to the sated mind.

Losing weight - and maintaining a new weight - was undoubtedly a much easier business when we suffered a straitened everyday diet, when products that we now take for granted were rare luxuries and even snacks were treats, when saturated fried foods were the exception, when, most signally, we lacked the income to eat and drink with promiscuous abandon. However, in those days fewer of us obviously had reason to reshape our bodies. And when we did so the gap between normal indulgence and the self-denial demanded by monotonous regimes was less chasmic than in the 21st century.

Diet books are as panacean as the rather kindred genus of management theory tracts that clog the shelves of airport bookshops. The difference is that while the high priests of business studies are linked only by their inability to distinguish the transitive from the intransitive, today's diet writers are mostly loath to deviate from the template laid down by Robert C Atkins 30 years ago. (Those with longer memories claim that Atkins merely rehearsed the prescriptions devised in 1863 in London by William Banting and published in A Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public. Banting had a professional interest in body-shape: he was an undertaker and coffin maker.) Both men counselled high protein, low carbohydrate. Fats were not proscribed.

The commonplace objections to Atkins are, first, on medical grounds: that the increased metabolic rate occasioned by an imbalance of protein may have long-term consequences for the circulatory system. And, secondly, on pecuniary grounds: Atkins's detractors argue that the maintenance of this diet (and its numerous derivatives) depends on a disposable income sufficient to afford truckloads of protein. Atkins does not thus address the demographic constituency which most suffers obesity, Cs and Ds on low incomes, who are obliged to subsist on processed foodstuffs and who are, further, ignorantly unapprised of the benefits of the cheaper cuts of meat. The industrialisation of the food chain in the Britain has, hygienically as well as gastronomically, much to answer for. There no longer exists in this country (or the US) the remotest equivalent of cucina povera or peasant cooking, which is characterised by sane resourcefulness. So the indigent will get fatter and the affluent will get faddier - and keep Atkins's heirs in business.