"Eggs and bacon were made for the breakfast table, not some poncy ice-cream," roared The Daily Telegraph, no doubt suppressing a florid belch as its morning kippers turned in its stomach.
Hash-browns are dismissed as "ghastly manifestations of American imperialism" (damned uppity colonials), and Sir Winston Churchill himself might as well be playing Elgar in his Union Jack underpants as we read that: "A good English breakfast never lets you down." No, it kills you. That's what an English breakfast does. The current £7.25 "Olympic" breakfast at Little Chef comprises: "two rashers of crisp backbacon, British outdoor-reared pork sausage, two griddled eggs, whole-cup mushrooms, crispy sauté potatoes, fresh griddled tomato, Heinz baked beans and toasted or fried extra-thick bloomer bread".
Olympic? What the hell event do they have in mind, the 3,000m casualty dash? The Triple Barf (also called the hop, skip and vomit)? The Synchronised Massive Coronary? Ye Gods, if that's what our young athletes are going to be packing down daily in advance of 2012 then we'll win even fewer gold medals than the, er, none, which I believe is currently predicted for this whey-faced generation of feckless British fatties.
The fried English breakfast was conceived during the Industrial Revolution (probably) as a form of fast fuel for a working class that actually worked. They ate 3,000 calories in the morning, then they burnt 3,000 calories by lunchtime. Or died when the mine collapsed. But you don't burn 3,000 calories driving a forklift truck, or answering the phone at Argos, or fiddling your disability benefit. The work dies, but the breakfast lives on. Result: obesity crisis. (Knowing this, and fearing the backlash, Little Chef recently moved to slim down "Fat Charlie", the obese chef who features in its logo, but nothing came of it - presumably because the porky little scrote just wouldn't stop eating.)
I'm not exaggerating about the effect of fried breakfasts on working-class health. I made a film for Channel 4 in 2005 called Tax the Fat (which I truly believe we should) in which I visited a truck-stop café just outside Pontefract. With a public health nurse at my side, I tested two dozen random truckers and found that none was less than 3st (19kg) overweight. Some had body-mass indices of around 50, which is double the level at which you are defined as "overweight" and only five points short of the score that has you reclassified as a small town. And all of them - all, mind - were eating fry-ups.
I managed to persuade one of these truckers, an 18st sweetie called Paddy, to replace his daily fried breakfast with a large bowl of porridge, but to make no other changes to his diet. We weighed him two weeks later. He had lost a stone.
You see, it's complex (or "slow-release") carbohydrates you want in the morning. They keep you going till lunchtime, don't set off crazy blood-sugar "spikes", and lay down no fat. Porridge, water, a little salt. Breakfast doesn't have to be a banquet. Your palate is so clean and mellow at that time in the morning that, with a cup of tea, swollen oats taste really quite interesting. There's the whole rest of the day, as your tongue clogs up with processed snacky gack, to start upping your intake of more sugary, fattier, punchier foods.
I'll tell you what's holding us back from finally getting rid of the fried English breakfast for ever: lack of education. You never see a person with a degree eating a fry-up, do you? Certainly not someone with a 2:1 or better in a humanities subject from a university founded before the invention of the iPod. That's because they are smart enough to know better.
And if you already knew that a fry-up was fatty and don't care, then you ought to know about some even scarier health risks you're running at your breakfast table.
According to the immune biologist Dirk Budka, of the Hale Clinic in West London: "Bacon, ham, sausage, all these foods are full of nitrates and other things designed to prolong shelf-life, and the longer the shelf-life the greater the bacterial activity. It's just as bad with smoked fish, kippers, all of that. All the patients who come to me with bowel trouble turn out to have high levels of these sorts of foods in their diets. And long-life food is terrible for people with allergies, too.And then of course there is all this fat. At this time in the morning, when your body is barely awake, suddenly your gall-bladder has to release emergency quantities of bile to digest the fat and it's going to be jumping in triangles. It's going to be screaming 'what are you doing to me?'. You're going to get heartburn, you're going to get belching..."
But apart from that, it's all good?
"Not at all, it's terrible. There's no proper carbohydrate. There's tinned baked beans, tinned tomatoes, more long-life food, more bacterial activity. And your English sausages are full of I don't know what. It's just what a butcher sweeps from the floor at night. A European will not eat these. In Europe a sausage is 90 per cent meat. I grew up eating good wurst like this. And rye bread. That's what you need to eat. To make a technical term: the English breakfast is full of rubbish."
Oh, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "wurst, rye bread... this Budka's a German, what does he know about a good breakfast?" And, indeed, there is more than a smidgen of nationalism, even xenophobia, in our attachment to the traditional English breakfast. The French have their croissant and coffee, the Greeks their sheep cheese and olives, but our morning plateful is honest and shiny and pink. Just like we are.
In fact, from his name, this geezer who's come in to ruin the Little Chef sounds like he might be a foreigner, doesn't he? "Heston" is OK. Sounds like he knows a thing or two about service stations. But "Blumenthal"? We didn't win the war to have some kraut come over here and feed us garlic sausage and pumpernickel for breakfast, no doubt with a side order of Lebensraum and a mug of hot Colditz. In fact, he sounds as if he might even be a Jew. A toasted bagel with cream cheese and lox is OK at Paddington station when you're waiting for a train. But if a pig hasn't been killed then we're not calling it breakfast.
If anything proves the dunderheaded wrongness of the fried British breakfast it's the fact that we crave one most when we've got a hangover. Sure, the fat and salt will exacerbate the dehydration that is causing the problem, making the headache worse, the sweats colder and the existential angst more palpable. But what the hell, we feel like it. We're drunk, we're underslept, we smell, we can't walk straight, it hurts to talk and all we want is something to make the blood rush to our stomach, and away from our brains, briefly ameliorating not only the cephalalgia, but also the guilt about snogging that tramp on the night bus. Something, above all, to thicken our sick when the nausea hits again.
And this you want to call a national dish?
Ross Anderson replies:
Hands off my sausage, Coren. I am not about to be lectured on what I eat by a man who gets paid for feeding his face.
The Times restaurant critic has a masterful way with words and a witty turn of phrase, but strip away the etymological pyrotechnics and what do you have? Preaching, that's what - and preaching of the worst sort: as practised by the nanny-state control freaks currently turning this country into a joyless puritan hellhole run by cyclists who knit their own tofu, where a glass of wine is a unit and lighting a fag risks summary execution for killing babies.
After smoking and drinking, it was obviously only a matter of time before the health gestapo turned their jackboots on us innocent lardbuckets. A tax on fat? Yeah, right, that'll work. Just like it does with alcohol and tobacco. We'll have ferryloads of white vans coming over from Calais laden with butter, cream, eggs and cheese to be sold by dodgy blokes with plastic carrier bags outside Whitechapel Tube station ("Pssst, squire, want a half pound of Normandy unsalted, only a quid?").
What I didn't expect was that a man who eats for a living would recommend porridge, a vile, gelatinous slurry made from a crop that civilised people feed only to their animals, eaten chiefly by 18th-century crofters thrown off their land by the English and unable to afford proper food. As for one's palate being clean and mellow in the morning, speak for yourself, mate. After a night on the lash my mouth is like the bottom of a baby's pram, and I can rarely taste anything before noon.
Obviously, if you had a massive fry-up every morning you'd end up being winched into your grave by JCB or whatever, like that poor bloke in Wiltshire the other week. And anyway, who has the time? My standard weekday breakfast is two double espressos and an Old Holborn roll-up.
But the weekend? Ah, the weekend. Time to wheel out the giant, blackened cast-iron skillet and get frying: tight-skinned, juicy sausages from Sillfield Farm; sizzling rashers of streaky bacon from the Ginger Pig; plump Bury black pudding; a couple of golden-yolked, free range, organic eggs; a ripe tomato, halved and fried cut-side down with a dusting of sugar to caramelise; home-made Scots potato scones, home-made Irish soda bread. This is not about quantity, it's about quality and irreproachable provenance: ask any good butcher and he'll tell you the pig's name.
As for the notion that only stupid people eat fry-ups, this would be news in Martin's coffee house in Cambridge, where generations of geniuses have been getting it down their necks for decades. Or in Maria's caff in Limehouse, where some of the nation's finest financial brains shovel in the carbs before trotting off to make more millions at Canary Wharf. Equally risible is the suggestion that any of this is unhealthy. Tell that to the NHS's beleaguered GPs, their waiting rooms packed to the rafters with nonagenarian coffin-dodgers who for their entire lives have been packing away the Full English, the Full Scottish, the Ulster Fry and whatever they call it in Wales, and still have nothing more wrong with them than an ingrowing toenail. Tell it to the pension funds, struggling to pay out cash to people who, if any of this healthy eating claptrap were true, would have burst an artery years ago.
Your breakfast advice, Mr Coren? As we say in Scotland: save your breath to cool your porridge.
Times-tested nosheries
Kitkat Café, Old Lydd Road, Camber Rye, East Sussex TN31 7RH
Great little beach cafe. Sit out on the deck and admire the views while you tuck in.
Wolseley, 160 Piccadilly, London W11 9EB
Serves one of the best bacon baps in London, with champagne, to boot. Grandeur and great food.
The St Giles Café, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU
Cheap little greasy spoon that has been curing student hangovers for years.
Gleneagles Hotel, Perthshire, Scotland PH3 1NF
The buffet breakfast is famously good.
Pete's Eats, 40 High Street, Llanberis, Gwynedd, Wales, LL55 4EU
Where climbers go to fuel up before a hard day in Snowdonia.
E Pelicci, 332 Bethnal Green Road, London E2 0AG
Family-run east-end café that has fed gangsters (the Krays), artists (Gilbert & George), taxi drivers and families for over a century.
The ferry between Uig, on the Isle of Skye to Tarbert on the Isle of Harris
Proper greasy spoon at sea. Endless bacon, beans and sausages made out of Scottish cow blood.
The Albion Café, 14 Albion Street, Exmouth, Devon
Brilliant fry-ups for students.
The Green Welly Stop, Tyndrum, Crianlarich, Perthshire, FK20 8RY
Unlimited coffee, great eggs and bacon, incredibly efficient service.
S&M, Islington, Spitalfields, Portobello in London
Does the best fried-egg sandwich, sausages and mug of workman's tea - the best hangover cure in the world.
conversion of food to biofuels is going to kill a hell of a lot more people. [Link]