Nicola Humble: A sample of our culinary smorgasbord

WHAT'S FOR DINNER?

Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University, until October 29

Do you remember Soda Streams? The multi-coloured syrups, the fizz and the excitement of being able to produce a commercial product in your own home? What about Golden Nuggets, with their deeply manufactured salt-sweet tang? And the early Alpen ads - with lusciously bucolic Swiss scenery rendered in glorious Technicolor? We meet these and much more nostalgia-evoking food in an exhibition designed to explain half a century of British eating habits.

What's for Dinner? at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture at Middlesex University concentrates on maximising the "I remember that!" effect, with fondue sets, TV dinner trays and a Cona coffee maker among the exhibits. Actually, there's little food on display; instead there's all the paraphernalia connected with it - advertising leaflets, packaging, magazines and cookbooks, crockery and cutlery.

What the exhibition captures very accurately is the enormous boom in convenience food that has marked the British culinary culture of the past 50 years: from the work of wartime scientists to preserve products and increase crop yields, through subsequent decades with freezers, microwaves and an ever-increasing range of meals that demand the least possible preparation. Their creation responded to - perhaps even facilitated - the wholesale movement of women into the workplace. Today, cook-chill meals have such a significant share of the market that many commentators suggest that the nation no longer knows how to cook.

But there is another story to be told about British food in the past 50 years. What of that culinary movement spearheaded by Elizabeth David and continued in the majority of our cookbooks ever since - the tireless quest for new food horizons, for the exotic, the authentic, the original? The culture represented by the cookbook and the colour supplement, the delicatessen and the "special" sections of the supermarket has been one of food tourism, ceaseless reinvention and a passionate interest in what we eat.

Some of this finds its way into the exhibition, which nods to our increasingly multicultural food heritage with Jewish Seder dishes and chopsticks. But the section on new flavours barely scrapes the surface, with the immense influence of foreign cuisines on our own in the past half century represented by David's Italian Food , a 1950s "bistro" wallpaper design, an avocado dish and a packet of Vesta curry.

What the exhibition never quite articulates is the profoundly schizoid nature of the modern British response to food. How we can reconcile a daily diet of sandwiches and cook-chill dinners with a weekend devoted to sourcing and lovingly preparing the latest fashionable cuisine? This curious confusion in our relationship to food emerges in only one place - in the film made by a recent graduate of the university's documentary film-making course. In the film, an articulate young woman talks earnestly about her Mauritian food heritage, the importance of healthy eating and the need to prepare meals from scratch. This worthy discussion plays over images of the subject sitting in front of her TV, consuming a staggering variety of processed snacks. Now that's British food culture.

Nicola Humble is a senior lecturer in English literature at Roehampton University. She is the editor of the Oxford World Classics edition of Mrs Beeton's Household Management and the author of Culinary Pleasures: Cookbooks and the Transformation of British Food , published by Faber, £16.99.