Haute cuisine on TV, junk on the motorways

Last week we watched a Masterchef  programme, in which a group of amiable young-ish people produced a series of elaborate dishes judged by experts on grounds of presentation, combinations of flavours and general technique.  I am newly aware of the perils of a split sauce or a cardamom crême anglaise that's not thick enough.

The following day we set off for Holyhead, 375 miles northwest of Hastings.  Our journey involved calls at various service stations for refreshment along the M25, M40 and M6.  Nothing could have better illustrated the gulf between the cooking programmes on the television and the brutal reality of daily eating on the country's motorways.

Franchises to Costa's, Starbuck's, McDonald's and the like result in a variety of processed foods without either taste or originality.  "Welcome Break" announced one of these refuges.  "Welcome to whom?" I wondered, as we ate a burger from a cardboard box - the bun was like a wrung-out flannel, the meat indeterminate (I am hoping it was cow rather than horse), the vegetables tasteless.  The accompanying chips were good.  Cutlery is considered superfluous, or perhaps it's felt that customers don't possess the necessary skills to handle a knife and fork.  If I'd raised the point with the establishment, doubtless there would have been references to "street food" - the growingly fashionable pretext for cutting corners by modelling our eating habits on the third world's poor.

These are seriously depressing places.  Our fellow-customers - a cross-section of the modern British? - were in many cases grotesquely overweight, hunching myopically over the sugar, carbohydrate and emulsifier concoctions on their trays with a weary apathy before waddling out, like so many penguins, to their oversized vehicles.

Perhaps it was always thus: the all-day breakfasts of transport caffs have merely been replaced by a more homogenised version, more slickly marketed.  There was no sign of a freshly made crême anglaise, let alone a sauce out of anything other than a sachet or branded bottle.  Seen from the motorway, Masterchef appears like an encounter with an alien species, heading alarmingly for extinction.

Antony Mair