As fans of Alice in Wonderland will know, it’s jam every other day — jam yesterday or jam tomorrow but never jam today. “All very confusing,” says Alice.

On Thursday, Marks and Spencer might make some of their customers wonder for a moment whether they too have walked into fantasy land. For February 26th is the day it introduces to its shelves a new product: the strawberry jam sandwich.

Basic or what?

For 75 pence you get, as you might expect, two slices of buttered white bread and a filling of strawberry jam. “For those who haven’t eaten one for years, one bite takes you straight back to your childhood,” says Marks.

The jam sandwich, it rhapsodises, is “one of the greatest simple pleasures of life” that will delight harried and nostalgic office workers.

Will it? — after all the weird and wonderful fillings we’ve got used to in the High Street over the past few years? Surely anyone could make a jam sarnie in a few seconds flat, and they’re not exactly nutritious.

On the other hand, in these recessionary times this could be the food of the hour.

Do you think the sandwiches will sell?

Just a year ago, Stuart Rose’s stock was riding high as the man who turned round Marks and Spencer but now he faces shareholder anger over controversial management changes, a big profit warning and a proposal to make him executive chairman as well as chief executive.

M&S shares lost 33 percent of their value last week after the warning.

Rose upset some analysts last week by announcing that head of food Steven Esom, who had been tipped as a potential successor, was leaving after only about a year in the job, following a sharply weaker performance at the food business.

Critics have accused the all-important M&S food section of failing to sniff the recessionary wind and keeping prices too high. It showed Rose was losing his sure touch, some said.

Others believe his refusal to trim his sails and cut the dividend to shareholders is another mistake.

What’s your opinion? Could M&S have acted quicker to adapt to the current hard times on the High Street?

Gordon Brown is asking us to stop wasting so much food and suggests that if we threw less away, demand would fall and then so too would food prices.

He says we’re throwing away around eight pounds worth of food a week, adding something like 420 pounds to the average family’s shopping bill.

But agricultural prices have increased some 40 percent over the past year and oil prices have doubled — is it really going to make much difference if we start paying less attention to sell-by dates?

Annual inflation has hit 3.3 percent, its highest level since the Bank of England was given control of interest rates 11 years ago.

But for many their personal inflation rate will be much higher, depending on where they live, and how much of their income is devoted to basics like food and energy costs.

How are rising prices affecting you - have you barely noticed any change, or are you seriously cutting back?

Chef Gordon Ramsay is never shy of courting controversy and he is back in the headlines again calling for restaurants to be fined if they sell out-of-season vegetables or fruit.

You could forgive the public for being confused when it comes to knowing where to eat, where to shop and what to buy.

Almost daily we are bombarded with conflicting information about whether food is healthy or not, or good or bad for the environment. For example, some groups say supermarkets should not give out free plastic bags (this week Marks and Spencer brought in a 5p charge), while other stores, such as Sainsbury’s say that is not the answer and will not bring lasting benefit to the environment.

Ramsay’s latest target is food flown in from abroad. “I don’t want to see asparagus in the middle of December,” he says. Most people over 30 can probably remember when a strawberry would never have been seen except during the British summer and the celebrity chef would like to see a return to the culture of eating home-grown produce.

What’s more, environmentalists argue that it is better for the planet, as according to the Department for Food and Rural Affairs, air freight emits more greenhouse gases per food mile than any other form of transport.

Ah, but what about the farmers in some of the poorest countries in the world who are producing the food for our supermarkets? That trade is vital to their wellbeing, with a million farmers and their families in Africa depending on it, according to the Department for International Development.

What’s more DFID says driving six and half miles to buy your shopping emits more carbon than flying a pack of Kenyan green beans to the UK. “Do we, in rich countries, help poor countries to trade their way out of poverty by buying their exports, or do we say no to air-freighting and buy local produce instead?,” DFID asks.

But then the champions of organic food, the Soil Association, argue that DFID has got it wrong and the government is being irresponsible.

So, is Ramsay just serving up a hot topic to help publicise his new TV show? Or is he right, and restaurants should be forced to use local produce?
Send us your comments

The crucial poll win in Pennsylvania by US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton came too late for many newspapers, who predominantly went instead with rising food prices and fears for a missing boy in Wednesday’s headlines.

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