2010, then. The start of a broad sunlit decade. As we chuck out the moulting Christmas tree and look back blearily on last month's excesses, we might feel tempted to make some changes in our lives. To eat healthier, cheaper food, and less of it – take stock, and make it more often.
But we should be wary of overhauling the way we eat just because we've started a new Dilbert calendar. Stripping fat from our food and leaving the sugar tongs unpinched won't, in themselves, bring us happiness. Weight lost on rigid diets invariably returns like a boomerang. 'Detox' is bunk. So tweaking a few manageable things in our food will likely help us more than puritan upheavals, with their threadbare misery, disappointed relapse and bitter stabs of regret.
Take booze. Most of us will have daintily sipped the odd sherry in recent weeks to survive the descent of the in-laws. But it would be a pointless tragedy to do a reverse-Cana and turn next year's wine into water. Alcohol is essential to winter: a hot toddy to heal a cold, a foaming stout by a flickering pub fire, a Shiraz swollen with dark berries and sunburnt mirth. A glass of champagne is a yellow burst of melatonin in the dreich depths of February, and it's good for you too.
The same goes for sugar and fat. Who wants to come home from the sleet and the hoar to a beansprout and grapefruit salad? No: a chicken and ham pie, its crust auburn and dappled, with buttered, minted peas boiled from the freezer and a smooth plop of mash – that's what gets northern Europeans through the cold leafless season. And I can't be alone in enjoying a scoop or three of Ben & Jerry's in front of a film while the blizzard howls outside.
Some resolutions we can probably agree with. Cutting out Pret once and for all and making our own lunches: soups roaring with chorizo and thick with beans and thyme and the Med; tabbouleh flecked with parsley, plumped with farmy goat's cheese, budded with pomegranate and slick with red peppers. Or fat, rare roast beef sarnies leftover from Sunday lunch, with the peppery crunch of rocket and horseradish stinging the sinuses.
And shopping less at supermarkets, and eating with the seasons more rigorously. And eating more veg. And eating more offal. And experimenting with new ingredients and cooking techniques, and spending quality time with kitchen appliances. And perhaps doing the odd bit of exercise. Small, lasting changes: neither fast or feast.
Have you made any food-based new year's resolutions? Are you scything chocolate from your diet, or red meat, ready meals or takeaways? Perhaps you think it's all a waste of time, and you'd rather leave things as they are? Or maybe your new life of stark asceticism begins today. If so, good luck to you, and happy new year. I think you'll need it.
