THE past few weeks have been full of extraordinary, bewildering food warnings, with confusing and contradictory claims about what is safe to eat. The only certain consequence has been to turn what should be a great pleasure into, increasingly, a source of unease and guilt.

It began earlier this month when the Food Standards Agency gave warning about overconsumption of salt, which is linked to high blood pressure and is apparently coming from our dependence on processed foods. But food makers countered that there was no evidence that the added salt was harming us.

Undeterred, the Government last week announced that sugar was next in its sights, claiming that sugary snacks were contributing to rising obesity. But this week two scientists published findings in a reputable journal which found that a group put on a low-fat, high-sweet diet actually lost weight and improved energy levels.

This month The Ecologist magazine claimed that pre-packed lettuce is coated with chlorine, a bleach linked to birth defects, bowel, liver and kidney cancer. The salad-packing industry shot back quickly, claiming that the amount of chlorine used to sanitise leaves a residue lower than the amount found in drinking water.

Consumers, meanwhile, are left in an awful no man’s land. We have more food than ever before in our history, supermarket shelves are bowed by options — feta this, fitter that. We have more cooks on television, more nutritional information generally. Yet, as our eating alternatives expand, so does our anxiety about eating itself — a “food doctor” in West London has a two-month waiting list.

Do you know any women who aren’t dieting, or at least talking about it? I don’t; it’s all Atkins, South Beach, cabbage soup, blood type, food combining, Beverly Hills, the Zone.

I take an interest because, once, I was nearly anorexic. I know the relationship between happiness and eating, between food “knowledge” and fear. In my case, it was thanks to a miserable six months in Los Angeles.

My move to LA was for the usual mid-twenties reasons, chasing success and blondes without getting either. My only brush with celebrity was being bitten by David Hockney’s dog, which may not count.

I arrived at LA international airport a mildly overweight optimist, blithely unthinking about food. Within weeks I was jogging and eating almost medicinally because everyone said “looking good” was the key to at least half my ambitions (the blonde half). By the time I fled back to Britain, broke and unemployed, food had become the determinant of my equilibrium. So bad had things got that I was even baking organic bread. Failure in the wider world clearly found solace in the controllable inner one.

Calories, those miserable foot soldiers of food faddism, were my friends, and I would count them every day, being careful never to reach beyond 2,500, the recommended amount for a man.

So it is fascinating to watch my former, mercifully temporary, insecurity about eating 16 years ago now being played out nationally.

Eating has become a secular religion, with all the pleasures, worries, denials, obsessions and uncertainty such status suggests. No wonder media nutritionists are routinely described as “gurus”, a word meant to denote a spiritual leader.

Pleasure, did I say? Everybody seems to be on a diet or trying to understand the labels on groceries. Thirtysomething women peer at kilojoules and carbohydrate content and weigh the merits of soya milk with or without added vitamin A. Children as young as five are said to have weight “issues”. Hardly a week goes by without a new warning about sugar, fat, salmon, tuna, wheat, coffee; alternating, of course, with those weeks when the warnings are reversed. It all seems to scream one thing: we’re adrift, losing our commonsense relationship with food. Self-confidence is evaporating. Limitless choice, it seems, is a sea with no horizon. Unsettling.