Food for thought - Telegraph As a contributor to this fine publication, it probably ill-becomes me to utter the discouraging word, but did last Sunday's edition over-egg the pudding in the food department? Anything to do with grub is leaning against an open door with me. Trencherman, rather than Terence, should be my middle name. What first set me on edge was that French doctor, whose cure for the obesity that's dragging the country to the gates of Hell is "get behind the stove, and start cooking." Inevitably, research shows that while we're 22.7 per cent obese, the French are only 16.9 per cent. Because they cook more than we do. Just cast your mind back a couple of years to a similar work of French fancy, when our womenfolk were compared unfavourably with their sisters across the Channel. The ladies of France, we were asked to believe, while stuffing themselves with all manner of rich foods and fine wines, were slimmer, sexier and the very epitome of chic. Come with me to a fête in any French town, and if you can find a female over 30 who could be called "chic" in your wildest imaginings, call me Gérard Depardieu. Then came the assertion that it was cookery that separated us from the chimpanzees. Good old Homo habilis discovered fire, then the cooking pot, and we were no longer chewing roots and eating what was left after a sabre-toothed tiger had had his fill. Virtually overnight, we were up on our own two feet, with improved digestion, and looking for a decent restaurant. Which is why I took exception to another piece, this time in praise of Peruvian cuisine. The next big thing, apparently, and, at its best, served raw. The chef is seen thinly slicing raw sea bass, marinating it, and serving it with chillies, red onion and sweet potato. So much, then, for the ground-breaking discovery of Homo habilis, who got us out of the trees by dint of the cooking pot, and made sapiens of us all. If it had been left to the likes of Peruvians, even David Attenborough would still be up there, in the branches, fighting with a bonobo over the remains of a squirrel. Perhaps it's just as well that the food of Peru is served cold. For when they do decide to give the griddle a go, the guinea pig is a firm favourite. According to Peruvian gourmets, it has a flavour reminiscent of pork and rabbit combined. It brings to mind an interview many years ago on Irish radio, with an old traveller, about his people's supposed fondness for the hedgehog. The interviewer wanted to know how it was cooked, but most importantly, what did hedgehog actually taste like? "Oh," said the old boy, "you know, a bit like chicken and a bit like cat."