It was 1982 when I resolved never to eat Spam again EVER in my whole life.

It used to be served up to me at my grandparents’ house and occasionally at home for lunch.

I hated the noise it made when it slid out the can; thinking about the colour and texture of it still makes me feel a bit green around the gills.

Like those skinny little frozen green beans that used to make me choke, Spam was on my hit list of Foods I Will Never Ever Eat When I Am A Grown Up And Able To Make My Own Dining Choices.

I know many people will disagree - Delicious magazine’s food writer Guy Dimond recently wrote about Spam fritters and instant mashed potato being his grandmother’s favourite treat for him, and when you look back, 70s and 80s convenience food was considered very modern and worldly at the time.

Who didn’t aspire to a frozen quiche or a boil-in-the-bag curry?

Food trends, like fashion fads, are the kind of thing you look back on in abject horror - did I really eat/wear that?

It seems inconceivable, as we all spiralise our courgettes and sprinkle pomegranate seeds on our cereal, that we might once have considered meat in a tin to be an exciting menu choice.

As Guy explains, the different decades have had their own eccentricities - post rationing, everyone went a bit nuts for butter, sugar and eggs and 1960s and 70s dinner parties were full of spaghetti bolognaise and garlic bread, prawn cocktail and baked Alaska.

Our increasingly exotic tastes through the 80s and 90s - thanks to more foreign travel, gastropubs and TV chefs - included the arrival of sushi, tapas and nouvelle cuisine.

And now, with even more cookery programmes and websites around than ever before, we continue to be obsessed with eating and cooking and watching people eating and cooking.

Apparently, however, this fondness for devouring foodie shows is covering up a national deficiency.

A study commissioned for National Butchers’ Week recently revealed that while three out of four people admit to regularly watching cooking programmes, less than one in three people actually try out the recipes in their own kitchens.

The survey also claims that one in five adults say they don’t know how to cook a Sunday roast, whilst three out of 10 don’t know the ingredients for a simple cottage pie, and a third of adults admit they can only cook only the simplest of meals.

Where did it all go wrong?

A chef friend of mine told me recently he gets exasperated when he hears cooking classes are being dropped or cut in schools.

“Cooking’s a core life skill,” he said. “It should be taught in primary schools, not just at secondaries. It’s just as important as maths.”

Maybe we all just need to be braver. Take risks, make time to try new things. Mary Berry, kitchen queen, got into trouble recently for daring to add white wine and cream to a bolognaise recipe, and her pie-that-had-no-base caused a national meltdown. But cookery isn’t an exact science - look at all the weird stuff that’s gone before.

I’m going to go for it. But I’m leaving the Spam on the supermaket shelves.....