For a paid-up glutton like me, the job of reviewing the latest cookbooks is one of the most pleasurable of the year. You try, you really do, to give some of the recipes a go, you dwell lasciviously on what can only be described as food porn in the way of the photography.

Jamie, Nigella, Delia and Gordon are part of the backdrop to the home, and even those cookbook authors who don't quite make it to being known only by their Christian names become like old friends. In fact, when I meet an eminent food writer, I assume an air of familiarity paralleled only by those sad saps who read celebrity magazines and think that they really do know Nicole, Madge, Wills, Kate, whoever.

In other words, I'm the last person I would have expected to go right off cookbooks. But this year the sheer quantity of them, the deluge of volumes on food, the Gargantuan excess of cookery writing, is starting to make me feel just a bit sick. Cookbooks take up space in the front table in every bookshop - that's the space that publishers pay to occupy - in the same way that food programmes colonise the telly schedules. Just as it becomes ever more difficult to get contemporary fiction and middlebrow biography into print, so the amount of cookery writing proliferates. Some of it is excellent but there's simply too much of it.

While we're spending ever smaller amounts of time preparing food, we're also spending ever more money to read about it. It's a bit like buying porn rather than engaging in sex: unhealthy. How many people who receive the foodies' favourite are going to cook a single meal from it?

In 1980 Brits spent two hours on average daily preparing food; now it's 20 minutes. Perhaps the recession will drive more of us into the kitchen with a copy of Delia's Frugal Food but we're more likely to give a present of a cookbook than actually spend an afternoon making dinner. Indeed, some of the cookbooks are driven by precisely that sense of dismay that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who can't turn their oven on - notably Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food.

In 2002 publishers sold 4.8 million cookbooks; last year it was 7.5 million; this year it'll be still more. Yet in the Seventies when cooking was a life skill, not something to brag about, most households ran only to a couple of Elizabeth Davids and possibly the Reader's Digest Round the Year Cookbook (my favourite).

As with every other kind of excess, this overload of food writing calls for a little self-denial. How about not buying cookbooks but getting on with cooking instead? Revolutionary, I know, but worth a try.

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