Man fashion guide

On a scale of one to ten, the Good Food Guide is up there with a limp lettuce

The Good Food Guide 1998 is out, so current it s early. More remarkably, it carries an endorsement from the New Statesman on the jacket. The quote comes from an NS article last summer, a celebratory affair written by a pleasant-sounding duffer who, many moons ago, worked for the guide.

Only a desperate publisher would lift his quote ("It stands for value, for sure; not just for money, but the great values of the kitchen"). His reminiscence, of a book run by erudite lefties with gastronomic tendencies, has little to do with the modern guide.

This contemporary book, fondly remembered for its bygone innocence, is now an embarrassing example of creeping commercialisation. That is not to say, however, that beneath its shiny blue cover, it is not still amateur, in the worst sense of the word. It works like this: readers write in about restaurant meals they have eaten. Various local burghers are elevated into regional inspectors. The editor and his staff helpers, after carrying out unspecified numbers of spot checks, then somehow fashion a cacophony of comment into a book. The result, admittedly, is amusing. Restaurants are "hidden away" and tart Tatins are "well rendered", as if they were goose fat. Once the editor is sufficiently acquainted with the restaurants, mainly through rewriting of letters from strangers, he takes it upon himself to score the cooking skills of the chefs.

It is a dire job, whose main preserve of power comes in the scoring. As a result, this is idiosyncratic. In the eighties a man called Drew Smith instituted a one-out-of-20 system that was then all the rage in France. Apres lui a more conservative historian, Tom Jaine, preferred a one-out-of-five range. Somewhere along the line, asterisks were dropped in, implying either an extra half point or some sort of sparkle. This year a newish editor, Jim Ainsworth, a former wine-writer for Punch, unveils a one-out-of-ten system.

No amount of digits will dignify the foolishness. Numbers, by definition, represent a basic value: a two is a two, a seven a seven. Even if a two could somehow be logically deduced from a note penned by a colonel in Harrogate about calfs liver and bacon, this same score of two could never correspond to a wilting salad recounted in a postcard by tourists in Canterbury. The Good Food Guide makes Olympic scoring of ice-dancing look positively scientific.

Yet the irrationality is far less obvious to the restaurant-goer than biased judges are to sporting audiences. Nor do most of us realise the depth of the insult. A competent restaurant cook will train for the better part of a decade before assuming his or her own kitchen - longer than a physician, teacher or editor. During this, the sacrifice is high, pay risible. Once at the top of his or her profession, the achievement will be rated by a system that would wipe the Vaseline-lubricated grin off the face of Miss World herself.

One would think chefs would riot. Rather, tired and punchdrunk, they anxiously look up an entry with a higher score, and then attempt to emulate the food that appeared to merit it. As a whimsical source of trends, the Good Food Guide is as powerful as Delia discovering cranberries, and twice as pernicious. It does as much harm to diversity of cooking as central-buying at Granada does for variety in roadside restaurants.

The publishers? None other than the Consumers' Association, our very own watchdog forever vigilant against questionable practice.