I was washing up in the kitchen after having some people round for lunch last weekend when Esther, who was tidying up in the other room, came in holding a bowl of olives and said, “What shall we do with these?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Cover them with a piece of tinfoil and put them inthe fridge?”

“I guess so,” she said. “But are we really going to want to eat a cold olive in the middle of the week?”

“Obviously not,” I said. “But it seems so awful just to throw them away. They were really good.”

“Well, do you want one now?” she said, sticking the high, garlicky-lemony bowl under my nose.

“Yuk,” I said, reeling away. “Not now. It’s ten o’clock at night and I’m full of booze and chocolate cake.”

The thing about olives, as I explained patiently to Esther while she hovered over the compost bin with her foot on the pedal, is that they are appealing to the palate only when you are utterly starving at 1.15pm on a Saturday and standing in somebody else’s house holding a strong drink.

“Not as appealing as nuts,” said Esther. “The nuts are all gone.”

“Yes, but the nuts went immediately,” I said. “They always do, no matter how many you buy. And then there are just the empty bowls sitting around, and you look stingy. Whereas people can only eat so many olives, so there are always some in the bowl, no matter what, and people can’t complain that the nibbles have run out.”

“So olives exist purely because the world needs a cocktail snack that is slightly less nice than a peanut?”

“Exactly,” I said. And looked forward to retelling the conversation in print and getting a lot of angry letters from Greeks.

In truth, though, I suppose it is just that there is a time and a place for certain kinds of foods. Olives, oysters, ugli fruit, patum peperium, tripe, sea urchin and Pernod are not necessarily things you would want to eat for breakfast, or at your desk, or on a plane, because they provide a complex, high-maintenance, almost sadomasochistic experience, which requires context. Whereas bread, bacon, chocolate, you can do any time, anywhere. It’s the difference between Scarlett Johansson and Tilda Swinton.

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