My brother always used to talk about the first time he saw a banana, just after the end of ‘the war’ as my generation still calls it. We should probably start referring to that conflict more specifically soon as there have been countless others since 1945.

My brother probably intended to make me feel like a privileged brat brought up immediately after the deprivations he suffered for his first eight years. And he had a point. But an incident made me reflect on the vast array of ‘new’ foods that have arrived in the UK in my lifetime. I was dining with friends whose other guests were from Sri Lanka and did not know what lychees were. I had imagined that being a lot nearer China than we were, that strange lapsang souchong of fruits might have reached them before it did us back in the 60s, when I remember very clearly going to my first Chinese restaurant which had just opened in Manchester. We felt so exotic.

Food has moved on apace since my childhood, when my mother would routinely boil her vegetables into soggy oblivion, in common with her contemporaries. Fresh peas were very common then and my Sunday morning job was to remove the little bullets from their pods and sneak the odd one raw when no one was looking. Who does that any more in these post-Birds Eye years? We had cauliflower, carrots, cabbage and broad beans (which I always thought tasted like sweaty socks). Where was broccoli back then? It must have been thrusting its now ubiquitous florets at us somewhere. Did we spurn it for its paler cousin the cauliflower? Every time I go to a restaurant now there seems to be a new vegetable that I have to ask the waiter to identify.

And what about fish? Cod was abundant and cheap. if you were rich you bought skate, halibut or haddock. Where did the John Dorey, Pollock, Bream, Turbot and Brill languish happily unloved back then?

And Scallops! They are very much the fishy come lately in every restaurant in the land, and they can be absolutely delicious. Were they skulking unnoticed in the lower oceanic depths all these years, thanking the mighty mollusc of the Sargasso Sea for their unloved status, until their scrumptiousness was discovered and ended their aeons of safety? What next?

And don’t get me started on ‘Jus’!