Delia Smith has started a holy war in Britain with her new book How To Cheat at Cooking and the accompanying TV series. 3.7million tuned in to watch the first show, and the foodsnobs exploded in anger. Burn her at the steak. There she was making cheap and quick recipes using frozen and tinned food and turning up her nose at organic and animals who've led happier lives than most people have.

Mick Hume in the London Times loves Delia who is " a domestic heroine in our house, where my wife, Virginia - a user of frozen pastry and Yorkshires - has long followed her recipes. This week's first episode made me warm to her even more, as she mixed dishes of “wonderful” frozen potatoes with tasty sideswipes at “poncy” cooking involving “drizzling”. She emerged less as the anti-Christ than the anti-Jamie Oliver - enough to have me asking for more. "

In Britain the "gastrocats" are going crazy. As in North America, going green is a class thing.

As Hume writes, the foodsnob reaction " reflects how food has been turned into a moral issue by those who seriously believe that we are what we eat. Thus the way to prove your wholesome character is through conspicuous consumption of the “right” foods. The flipside of such snobbery is that cheap or processed food is seen as the mark of cheap people, morally as well as nutritionally deficient. This heats up an old prejudice. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey notes how the likes of T.S. Eliot, H.G. Wells, John Betjeman and George Orwell railed against the “soulless” tinned food of the masses. These elitist prejudices are fashionable once more, expressed in the language of eco-ethics.

"To these critics, Delia's real heresy is to shun the politics of food and insist that the only proof of the pudding - such as her chocolate cake made with frozen mash - is still in the eating. Her missing ingredient is the self-raising righteousness of chefs who tell us to research and make friends with our food."

All those chefs incidentally owe their art in large part to Escoffier, the French chef who laid down the rules of the classic cuisine, rules that pertain today wherever cooking is good. Escoffier was so appalled by the starvation he saw in the Franco-Prussian war that he started canning food himself as a prevention against future shortages. He was a truly moral, unlike celebs like Jamie Oliver who take quarter of a million to shill for Sainsbury's supermarkets and then trash them. And so was Alexis Soyer, of London's Reform Club, who cooked for the poor and the British army in the Crimean War.

A strain of misoygny, which is running strong through the US primaries, is also evident in food snobbery. Why won't women stay in the kitchen where they belong ? Read the current gastrocat-lit this side of the pond and you'll find it's the well-off women like Barbara Kinsolving who can afford to go green.

"Delia may simply be offering a practical alternative to those food-porn recipes that few will cook. But she also reminds us of a wider truth about how our society - especially the female half - has advanced by reducing the effort we put into the basics of existence. As another old favourite of mine, Karl Marx, put it, “Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.”

Or as Delia said in Monday's show, she likes quick, easy recipes “because there are other things in life apart from eating - although eating is pretty good”.