Slates have been getting a slating this week. Get it?! Slates? Getting slated? They can’t use that in the headline now – I’ve nabbed it. A lovely great big apposite yet unenjoyable pun. Stick that on your slate and eat it. Perhaps using some sort of gooey reduction as a gum, just to keep all the wrong-coloured tomatoes in position.

Actually, I stole the idea from the Daily Mail which went with “Slated! Plates back on menu”, although there’s a chance that, unprompted, I could have thought of it myself. I don’t think it’s ridiculous self-flattery to suggest that. It’s just a pun on slate – it’s not the Dyson Airblade. Though both are products of Eurosceptic creativity. Maybe they can make Brexit work if they maintain this level of output. Though some claim it just makes an unpleasant noise and blasts microparticles of excrement all over the place, poisoning the atmosphere. I’m talking about the Daily Mail.

So the thing I’m going on about here is the news that the British have eaten their fill of food served on wacky objects – of which the slate is probably the least wacky example. The slate and the wooden board, as weird surfaces on which to present a meal go, are comparatively conventional, a bit square. Though not as square as the square plate. Which itself is obviously much less square than the round plate. Square as in boring and conformist, that is. Not square as in a regular quadrilateral. That sort, the square plate squarely nails. If you want a good square meal, go for the square plate, unless you mean “good square meal” in the idiomatic sense connoting solid straightforwardness, rather than straight-sidedness, in which case the circular plate is the squarer option.

Who doesn’t want to come across as in touch with the zeitgeist, but too down-to-earth to be impressed?

I’ve put it very succinctly but those were broadly the findings of a YouGov poll published last week. YouGov showed 2,030 people a series of increasingly unorthodox food platters and receptacles and asked which ones, assuming they were clean, the respondents thought were acceptable items for serving meals in. Or on. The crazy replacement crockery examples were suggested by an organisation called “We Want Plates”. It describes itself as “the global crusade” against zany food service, has spent years documenting all the mad things dinners have been smeared on in the name of style, and will sell you a “Plates Not Slates” hoodie for £40.

The poll result was a wholesale rejection of the non-plate. Of those surveyed, only 69% and 64% respectively had any truck with slates or wooden boards, only 52% wanted their chips in a plant pot, flooring panels received the approval of just 28%, shovels of 17%, dog bowls of 10% and a measly 9% would tolerate their food being brought to them in a perfectly clean and sanitary shoe. Joyless curmudgeons. What do they hang up for Father Christmas? A large jiffy bag? Who knew that people were so fussy?

If you want confirmation of that fussiness, the survey also found that, while square plates were acceptable to a surprisingly high 96%, circular plates met the approval of an amazingly low 99%. That’s right: 1% of them weren’t happy with their meal being served on a round plate. That’s roughly 20 people. Even if the 99% was actually nearly 99.5%, it’s still 10 or so. What do those guys want? Nutrient injections? Their lunch to be fired at their faces from a trebuchet? How is the food supposed to get to be in front of them?

But let’s leave aside that anomalous dozen of hover-meal-insisting extremists – they probably didn’t understand the survey or thought round plates were imposed by Brussels. What about this stinging rejection of the plate replacement? How could Britain’s restaurants have got it so wrong? Should we blame the Westminster bubble (a light foam that goes well with poached turbot on a bed of samphire served on the back of a No Entry sign)? How should the food service industry respond?

In my experience, everyone has always slagged off the weird items food gets served on. This kind of service has been happening for a few years now – decades if you count scampi and chips in a basket (which I suspect most people don’t because that’s an old-school notion, uninfused with hipsterish wank). But the square plates and boards and general non-standard plate objects probably started appearing at the end of the last century. Precisely one second later, as the very first zany meal was plonked down in front of a diner, that diner said they thought it was silly and their dining companion agreed, and their mealtime chat was bolstered by reflections on how impractical it all was and what idiots some people were. Lovely.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

Thinking it’s stupid to serve food on a non-plate is one of those mysterious reactions that, despite being breathtakingly predictable, still feels original. You feel like you’re the only person who’s ever felt that way, which makes it a bit like being in love. So it’s an enjoyable feeling and one which, if food were never served insanely, no one would experience.

It’s also enjoyable to talk about, not just during the meal but later. It makes good conversation: under cover of a funny story about soup served as thousands of tiny droplets each clinging to a bristle of an upturned brush, or a paella dished up in an old disc drive, we let slip that we’ve been eating out in trendy places. We’re in touch with the zeitgeist, but are too down-to-earth to be impressed. Who doesn’t want to come across like that?

So it’s entirely unsurprising that, when surveyed about their views on this, people delightedly state their annoyance at silly restaurant trends. They do it because it’s fun. It’s not a sign of genuine consternation at food-service fashion any more than skiing is evidence of desperation to escape mountaintops. It’s recreational.

The daftest part of this outward board-dom (should have left that for the headline writers) is the implication that restaurants don’t realise it’s easier to use normal plates, and that there’s something frivolous or foolish about them worrying about their image as well as the food. But of course there isn’t. They’ve got to. There are cheaper and quicker ways of satisfying nutritional needs than eating out, so it’s vital to surround the process with a few frills, something memorable, some signs of effort. There’s no real justification for despising serving cheese on a skateboard, or steak on a hot anvil, unless you’d equally scorn a tablecloth.