In this edition of eminent scientist Dr Edward Tennyson’s irregular column, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is placed in a conical flask with a sprinkling of magnesium and brought to the boil over a blue flame.

TV’s Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is lauded for his uncompromising commitment to ‘real food’. In his current programme River Cottage: Gone Fishing (C4, Thursdays, 8pm) he discusses how water-dwelling creatures should be caught and prepared to provide folk with good, honest fishy fayre. Fearnley-Whittingstall seems like a decent enough chap and his impassioned advocacy of natural foodie goodness is quite charming. However, his celebration of real food is predicated on somewhat shaky scientific and philosophical foundations. Read on for these revelations…

1) Anthropologists have established that hunter-gatherer males spent approximately 20 hours a week working. The majority of this time was spent hunting for food in the form of animals such as woolly mammoths. Once sufficient food had been acquired for the week it was returned to the cave where it was prepared and served to the tribe. This preparation included cutting up the meat, throwing it on a fire, then leaving it until it was burnt.

Cavemen didn’t spend hours talking about the wholesomeness and worthiness of their real food – they cooked it and ate it. This is because they had to actually work hard to survive and protect the tribe from external threats such as meteorites. In the modern era however it is deemed natural to spend approximately 196 hours a week talking about the preparation of real honest, good food. This attitude, exemplified by Fearnley-Whittingstall, is actually an evolutionary anomaly: there is nothing natural about a time-consuming infatuation with the preparation and consumption of food.

Some low-grade office bitchiness aside, contemporary ‘work’ is no longer wedded to the battle for survival and is primarily concerned with distracting the bored human mind with broken photocopiers and lost coffee mugs. Fearnley-Whittingstall clearly demonstrates the endeavour to reinvest these minds with lost natural qualities such as the acquisition and preparation of real food. However, his approach actually exacerbates humanity’s distinction from its evolutionary roots. If our distant ancestors had spent all evening intensely discussing the herbs they were adding to their mammoth pie, they would have been wiped out by the dinosaurs well before the Triassic period.

2) A further significant problem with Fearnley-Whittingstall’s perspective relates to what we academics refer to as ‘the naturalistic fallacy’; that natural equals good. He argues that natural food is good whereas he is righteously appalled with synthetic man-made food.

However, science has provided humanity with indispensable items such as electricity and tarmac. Food made by science should not therefore be dismissed as unwholesome too readily. Nature, on the other hand, is in no way intrinsically good and is responsible for, amongst other things, rain and death. Food made by nature should not therefore be accepted as unequivocally ‘good’; and Fearnley-Whittingstall’s naturalistic strivings are thus illegitimate.

It is possible to ascertain the most relevant food to contemporary social conditions with reference to the aforementioned scientific and philosophical findings. Our ancestors demonstrated that speed and simplicity were crucial to the preparation of food. Rigorous analysis of the naturalistic fallacy has also shown that science is always right. Therefore, a synthetic cheeseburger, purchased from a garage forecourt and nuked on ‘high’ for one minute, is the perfect culinary accompaniment to modern existence. Sorry Hugh!