The rise of vast portions – particularly in fast-food restaurants – means that if we eat only the calories we need, we should often stop at half of something; or even a quarter. And no one – child or adult – seems to like the feeling of the glass- – or plate – half empty.

Hunger is always a kind of emptiness – an absence of nourishment – but what it will take to replenish it is far from obvious.

As things stand, our culture is far too critical of the individuals who eat junk foods and not critical enough about the corporations that profit from selling them. We spend a lot of time discussing unhealthy foods in terms of individual guilt and willpower and not enough looking at the morality of big food companies that have targeted some of the poorest consumers in the world with products that will make them sick, or the governments that allowed them to do so.

It was little trouble to boil up mutton and water and mash in some leeks, garlic, and green herbs, then leave it to bubble away in its own good time. The elementary pattern these Mesopotamian recipes took was: prepare water, add fat and salt to taste; add meat, leeks, and garlic; cook in the pot; maybe add fresh coriander or mint; and serve.

But in most places, the new global diet has involved a narrowing down of what people eat. Our world contains around seven thousand edible crops, yet 95 per cent of what we eat comes from just thirty of those crops. As omnivores, humans are designed to eat a varied diet, so there’s something strange and wrong when, as a species, we become so limited in our choice of foods.

Our kitchens are filled with ghosts. You may not see them, but you could not cook as you do without their ingenuity: the potters who first enabled us to boil and stew; the knife forgers; the resourceful engineers who designed the first refrigerators; the pioneers of gas and electric ovens; the scale makers; the inventors of eggbeaters and peelers.

Many of us cling to particular vessels, fetishizing over this mug or that plate.

The true value of food goes beyond price, and once we collectively start to realize this once again, the challenge will be for policy makers to build food environments that encourage people to make better food choices rather than berating them for making bad ones.

This technological stagnation reflects a harsh truth. There was very little interest in attempting to save labor when the labor in question was not your own.

No home-cooked food, no matter how delicious, can match the power of bringing people together in misty-eyed recollection of industrially produced food.