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I have written many mean things about English food. After all, I am entitled to: I was brought up on it - if you'll forgive the expression.
Under the lash I was forced as a child to eat boiled cabbage, boiled carrots - even boiled pig's intestines, along with admonishing reminders that the Chinese were starving.
Frankly I could never see the correlation. How could my eating boiled cabbage help the Chinese?
But whose cookery programmes now wow TV viewers? Exactly! The English.
Programmes on English cuisine were once as unthinkable as Japanese programmes on conservation.
A British restaurant, The Fat Duck in Bray Village, west of London, has been awarded the title of "Best Restaurant in the World" by an international restaurant magazine.
And the American magazine, Gourmet, voted London "the best place in the world to eat out".
Even more interesting - Britain now has a wine route. No longer can we South Africans joke about the rarity of a good Liverpool merlot.
Britain's wine route is in the south east and the wine farmers feign surprise when they see visitors are surprised. They point out they're only 130km north of France's Champagne region and have similar soil.
South Africa, as we all know, has a growing number of trails, except we call them "meanders".
There's the Lowveld Meander noted for its African curios; the Midlands Meander noted for its arts and crafts; and the Ogies Meander - even army tanks would have to meander through there because of all the potholes.
Well, Claire at the Johannesburg headquarters of VisitBritain (it used to be the British Tourist Authority) tells me that Britain has stacks of meanders too and most of them are associated with food and drink.
They even have a sausage trail!
Britain's first trail - the Malt Whisky Trail - opened decades ago. It was set up around the distilleries of north-east Scotland.
I recall visiting one of the quaintest of them. It was up in the mountains and as I was standing in the snug bar lounge talking with the charming hostess, we were looking out of the window into the pouring rain at an expanse of water surrounded by trees.
I enquired politely: "I suppose that's where you get your water?"
She replied: "No, that's the car park."
England now has a cheese trail (why don't we have one, with all our superb cheeses?) and they even have a tea trail.
The latter is in the Lake District.
There you can "take tea" complete with home-made scones, cakes and those dainty triangular sandwiches and, I suppose, drink it from those aggravating, almost transparent china cups in which the tea goes cold in five seconds and you can't get your finger through the handle.
The Scots have even created a seafood trail.
Why haven't we?
As I have said before, we should stop exporting our crayfish and perlemoen and tell overseas tourists: "If you want South African shellfish (not forgetting Swapkopmund's fat oysters), then come and get it - and enjoy our fabulous wines along with it."
We could have the world's most attractive seafood and wine trail right here in the Western Cape.
Because exporters make so much profit exporting it, crayfish has been priced way beyond the pockets of most South Africans. So has perlemoen.
California stopped exporting its shellfish years ago. As a result, their shellfish has become part of the unique Californian experience and is cheaper than it is here.
Incidentally, my nephew from the UK who visited Cape Town last year was charged R200 for a small crayfish tail and R34 per oyster. That is sheer greed on the part of the restaurateur.
But it is even more shameful that the Department of Trade and Industry has allowed the fishing industry to hog our crayfish and then penalise South Africans.
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