Meals in minutes

In 1979, the poultry department of Marks & Spencer took a big gamble. Garlic was still considered an exotic ingredient, something of a novelty, but the supermarket’s food developers decided to include melted, garlic butter in their latest product: Chicken Kiev . It was Britain’s first chilled ready meal, and it proved hugely popular. Frozen TV dinners had been on sale since the Fifties, but as microwaves became more common in the 1980s, convenience food took off.

At the same time, we were spending less time doing manual work and more hours behind a desk. “That dramatic reduction in physical demands means that we have to eat far less than we did before in previous generations,” said Prof James. When we ought to have been cutting back, eating more had never been easier, or quicker to do.

By 2012, more than £2.6 billion of prepared meals were being sold every year in Britain. In the same year, a study published in the British Medical Journal found that none of the ready meals examined fully complied with the World Health Organisation’s nutritional guidelines.

In the Morrisons in central Whitehaven, almost an entire row of fridges were taken up by ready meals, some of which had red “traffic light” warnings for high amounts of saturates, salt or fat – or all three. There was a loaded chilli wedge melt for one, with beef chilli and Monterey Jack cheese: 625 calories. There were "Just for Kids" ready meals, boasting they were low in salt and contained no hydrogenated fats. There were even Weight Watchers ready meals.

Fast food has boomed, too. According to one Cambridge University study, the number of takeaway outlets rose by almost 50 per cent in the two decades to 2008. On average, Britons order a takeaway at least once a week, one survey claimed.

More than half of our diet is now made up of fat and sugar - with North West England eating the most fat and the South and East eating the most sugar.