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Cooking is like sex. Those who do it well and often don't need to talk about it much. Those who don't, well ... Perhaps I'm breaking my own rule, but this week I need to talk about food. This time of year, in the bountiful weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, my mind turns most completely to thoughts of food - and it tends to stay there, quite greedily, until the annual gluttony of the Christmas season is over.

A Thanksgiving feast is, of course, one of life's great pleasures and not to be missed for hell or high glycemic index, but this year I am tempted to go on a pacifist hunger strike in protest against the kitchen wars.

What are the kitchen wars?

Well, increasingly, you may have noticed, there is a sharp divide among people who care about food. On the one side, you have the Real Home Cooks. These are people who prepare their own meals from scratch several times a week, often for their loved ones, but just as often for themselves. Although they are interested in good ingredients and have a wealth of knowledge about food (they have usually been cooking all their lives), they are anything but culinary snobs, are happy to make last-minute substitutions, never parade their knowledge and understand the simple pleasure of a poached egg on toast.

On the other side, you have the foodies or, as British food writer Nigel Slater calls them, the Kitchen Fusspots. Precious to the point of pathological, the Fusspot is more interested in the status-oriented lifestyle connotations of food than the act of cooking - much less eating - itself. With their climate-controlled wine fridge and subscription to Cheese Lovers Monthly, their interest in food is less a visceral fascination than a nerdy specialization, just like their "passion" for contemporary furniture, fusion jazz and Pilates.

While the Real Home Cook can whip up simple and delicious meals from out of her nubbly wool sleeve at a moment's notice, the Fusspot's idea of cooking is a different thing altogether.

"Meals emerge from their kitchens with a sense of expectation," Slater writes, "each ingredient having been painstakingly sourced, every direction in the cookery book followed to the letter, and inevitably late. The meal has something of the theatrical production about it, albeit amateur dramatics, as if it has all been so, so much trouble. Which of course it has. And don't we know it."

Kitchen Fusspots, Slater goes on to explain, are almost always male and rarely prepare a meal more than once a month. Cooking, in other words, is not an everyday pleasure and necessity for them, but a mark of sophistication, intellectual superiority and one-upmanship.

The problem, of course, is that while KFs have their wine agent on speed dial and are happy to spend a week's salary on prime rib, most wouldn't know a blancmange from a mashed swede.

I was brought up by a mother who is a genuine RHC - not only does she know how to throw an effortless dinner party, she also gardens, cans, pickles and regularly bakes her own bread. When I was growing up, she actually made maple syrup from the trees in our backyard (the reduction process took two weeks, peeled all the paint off the kitchen ceiling and produced exactly one Mason jar of syrup, but that's another story).

Because of my mother's prowess in the kitchen, I have never considered myself much of a cook. A proper cook, to my mind, was someone who had as firm and practical a grasp of Cordon Bleu methods as they did of traditional Chinese. They could make their own wontons, confit a duck and had a freezer full of homemade stock.

Having said that, I do like to cook. My reasons are anything but complicated; in fact, they are ridiculously simple. Food is necessary to live. It also happens to be a delight, if decently prepared. Restaurants are expensive and, more often than not, overrated. So cooking at home is as obvious as, well, pie. My idea of a perfect homemade dinner is not complicated, and ranges from a crispy roast chicken to a humble cheese omelette. The uniting factor is the tasty unpretentiousness of the food.

Because of my limited cookery skills (unlike my mother, I have never made a soufflé or baked an Alaska), I have always deferred to people who describe themselves as "foodies." Surely, I assumed with their library of hardback recipe books and Pusateri's executive club card, they must know things I could never dream of.

In recent months, however, I have found myself on the receiving end of more than one haughty monologue about, say - the difference between cava and Prosecco or the meaning of the term "al dente" - when I suddenly realized that the foodie haranguing me knew far less about food than I did.

Since when did nouveau culinary snobs with no real knowledge save what they've gleaned from glossy magazines and Gordon Ramsay's rants on Hell's Kitchen decide that they were the anointed experts on how the rest of us should eat?

Eating is not a lifestyle choice - it's a necessity. The impulse to fetishize and overcomplicate mealtime with special needs and expert knowledge is not only tiresome, it's unappetizing.

That's why this Thanksgiving I'm on hunger strike. No organic free-range turkey in a port reduction sauce for me. This year, I'd just like a cup of Tetley and a piece of toast - just the white, squishy processed kind, please.