I was a glutton and I’m sorry.

It was almost a year ago when I wrote my last restaurant review. What made it hard to do was that I was closing the door on an aspect in my life that I’d been most publicly associated with.  For more than 10 years I had been writing about restaurants – where to eat what.

I still believe in many of the things I wrote about: eating local; creating dishes from the best possible ingredients with the least possible fussiness; selecting artisan producers over commercial ones and having respect for produce and livestock and the conditions under which they are grown and raised.  I also promoted gluttony. For me the prize at a quality buffet was to manage three or more helpings. Free-flowing Champagne was something I celebrated. Oyster quaffing at breakfast was a reason to visit. If I was dining with someone with a smaller appetite I’d swop plates to finish their food in addition to my own. I even recall one media lunch where I wolfed down five lobsters, just because I could.

I’m sorry if the way that I wrote about food, or indeed if reports of my behaviour, made you eat more than you had to. My wish to promote foodie excellence may also have meant I promoted gluttony. I’m sorry for this.

I often criticised the recent trend of “molecular gastronomy” or “deconstructionist cuisine” because it was, more often than not, badly executed. I now object to it on different grounds – the world over our relationship between ingredients and the food we consumer is more skewed than it has ever been. Despite accurate ingredient labelling we have become lulled into accepting that bread that doesn’t go mouldy in a week is a good thing or that the convenience of shoving a pre-prepared meal from the freezer into the microwave in two seconds, represents an advance. In this environment, where we are desensitized to what we consume, I think making an art form out of presenting ingredients in a way that makes them hard to recognise is not “witty” or “innovative” as I once described it. I celebrated the way chefs hoodwinked us.

Although I don’t choose to eat Foie Gras now on account of its high-fat content, I’m not sorry for promoting it. I still maintain that an animal that is raised well for most of its life, before being fattened so that its liver tastes better than ordinary liver, is ethically no different from a child that is taught ballet from an early age so that as an adult they can contort their bodies into unnatural positions for our entertainment. I do, however, object to the way battery chickens are raised and how used to purchasing skinless, boneless chicken breasts that we’ve all become that it has no connection to the animal that produced it.

I was wrong that I needed more. In fact, I needed less. We all do.