IT'S an ill wind, as they say. As last week's Recession Watch brought news of burgeoning repossessions, a car industry on its knees and an unemployed engineer who recreated scenes from the 1930s by touting for a job with a sandwich board round his neck, there was a glimmer of hope: yes, the sale of junk food is apparently going through the roof.
While other professions are shedding jobs as prolifically as Helen Mirren sheds her clothes, fast food chains are busy creating new ones. As staying in becomes the new going out, hard-pressed families are swapping meals in upmarket restaurants for fa
t-laden takeaways in front of the TV.
So, after years when our obsession with fast food seemed to be on the wane, almost every chain from McDonald's to Dunkin' Donuts is now reaping dividends from the economic downturn. Domino's Pizza, whose profits have rocketed by almost a quarter, plans to open a further 50 outlets this year, creating another 1,500 jobs in the UK and Ireland; KFC expects to create 9,000 posts at between 200 and 300 new restaurants; the sandwich chain Subway is to open 600 stores, creating 700 jobs. Greggs' sales were up 5.3% in the four weeks to January 3, and it too has expansion plans. Long live scotch pies and stodgy jam doughnuts.
I referred to these announcements as a glimmer of hope but, of course, I meant the opposite. The news is only positive if you're the kind of person who likes to see the High Street's chic little boutiques and delicatessens replaced with Everything-For-A-Pound shops. Or who feels most at home when eating tasteless gunk out of a cardboard box.
The rise of fast food outlets is at the expense of independent eateries (100 restaurants in the UK closed last month alone) and the health of a nation already in the grip of an obesity crisis. It will provide dead-end jobs at the minimum wage in place of the skilled construction and manufacturing ones that are disappearing. So, in truth, it is perhaps as bleak a revelation as any the recession has yet had to offer.
It is interesting, though, what such trends reveal about this essentially middle class recession (and I think it's fair to assume it's the middle classes who are fuelling the takeaway boom because feeding a family of four for under a tenner is only a bargain if you're used to truly splashing out). For years, dinner party bores have been indulging their taste for gastro-porn – droning on about organic vegetables and castigating the feckless poor on their poor nutritional habits.
They've campaigned against turkey twizzlers, burger vans parked outside schools and junk food adverts shown during children's TV programmes. Now it turns out they're not so superior after all. When life is stressful and money's short, they don't rustle up a delicious meal from an egg, a tin of tuna and a couple of carrots, while stoically whistling 'Pack Up Your Troubles'. They head down the chippy for a large dollop of comfort food just like everyone else.
And, to be honest, I know how they feel. It's all very well drawing up a meal planner to a precise budget and scouring the supermarket shelves for bargains, but when your children can divest your fridge of its entire "weekly" contents before you've finished unloading them from the shopping bags, and still complain of being hungry, it's much easier just to pack them off to a pizza shop for a calorific blow-out.
Such dietary lapses would be fine if – like last month's heavy snowfall – we perceived the recession as a fleeting opportunity to indulge ourselves before returning to normality. But if, as seems infinitely more likely, the economy is going to get worse before it gets better, then nipping out for a takeaway every time we need a morale boost is a dangerous and retrogressive precedent to set.
Instead, we need to revolutionise our eating habits: to ditch the footery recipes with the 15 exotic ingredients and get back to basics: learning how to poach eggs and sauté potatoes rather than engaging in culinary one-upmanship.
To be fair, there have already been a few positive signs. People now seem less inclined to waste food; where in July last year, a report suggested the average family was throwing away £420 of food a year, cash-conscious shoppers have swamped the website Approved Food, which specialises in past-their-sell-by-date groceries, with orders since the start of the year.
Butchers have reported an increase in requests for cheaper cuts such as brisket, feather steak and beef skirt, which require more cooking in order to be tender. And books such as Gil Holcombe's How To Feed Your Whole Family a Healthy Balanced Diet, With Very Little Money And Hardly Any Time, Even If You Have A Tiny Kitchen, Only Three Saucepans... Unless You Count The Garlic Crusher have been taking their place on cookery shelves alongside Nigella's more exotic tomes. On the downside, recent months have also seen an upsurge in sales of spam and tinned spaghetti, so we've a way to go before we rival our grandparents' ability to make a little go a long way.
Perhaps, if the recession lasts long enough, more people will start growing herbs on their window ledges, and learning to make hearty meals such as stovies and Irish stew. But my guess is that so long as tired, hungry people catch the whiff of fish and chips on a trying day, takeaways will continue to make a decent living. Unless the collapse of capitalism reduces us to a post-apocalyptic landscape, where we are forced to forage in the woods for nuts and mushrooms, our love affair with all things hot and greasy is likely to endure.
