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By Vikki Graves

If you believe everything you read, our eating habits have gone into a steep decline. This time last year, your average Brit was walking home from the farmers’ market chomping an a fluffy organic roll stuffed with freshly roasted pig and apple sauce. But then this nasty credit crunch business came along and pushed many of us away from the hog and towards the Big Mac.

When Jamie Oliver first made his cheap salmon fishcakes in the Sainsbury’s advert, the idea of ‘credit crunch cuisine’ was not yet fully formed. Many of us foodies still sneered at supermarket bargain ranges and headed for the now dwindling organic aisle. These days however, more and more of us will be throwing a few tins of cut price tomatoes into the trolley.

But doesn’t look like us foodies are quite willing to give up our gourmet fishcakes just yet. In response to this week’s news of rising profits for McDonald’s and Domino’s, and the expansion of KFC, The Guardian’s food blog  declared the situation to be “utterly depressing. Penny-watching consumers are turning away from conventional restaurants and slobbing out on the sofa at home, not with a bowl of hearty, homemade soup, but with a whopping great bucket of fried chicken or a calorie-laden pizza.”

Have these people not embraced the true spirit of credit crunch cuisine? Why do they not pinch their pennies bycooking sensible healthy meals from scratch?  And eat out occasionally at their locally owned and run bistro which serves fashionable, cheap (but still delicious and healthy) cuts of meat at reasonable prices? Because apparently they prefer “slobbing out” which, though cheap, is not fashionable.

Before, many of us could afford to eat premium quality foods if we liked. The buzz words were ‘fresh’, ‘organic’, ‘ethical’, ‘local’. But did we want those things because we believed they were better for us, or because they were de rigueur?

Now the doom and gloom has struck our wallets and our trolleys. And the word on the street is ‘cheap’. The diehard foodies have dusted down their slow cookers, but it may well be that some of us have fallen off the home cooking wagon, decided eating out is too expensive and landed comfortably on the sofa with a Domino’s.

For all of us, what we eat has become firmly associated with a need for cheapness and value. For some that will come from their own kitchen, and for others it will come from KFC. Because if you want to talk about calories and fat, even a home cooked pizza can provide ample quantities of both.