I overheard a food-industry colleague at a lunch last week talking about various trends in food. He was saying the term “ingredient-driven cooking” was getting press these days. “Really,” I said, “Is there an alternative?” Well, it turns out, indeed there is: “technique-driven cooking.” Ah. Somehow I didn’t know that. Now that I do, I still haven’t a clue what it means.

Presumably, ingredient-driven cooking is illustrated by a dish such as insalata caprese: mozzarella and tomatoes sliced on a plate, scattered with basil, and drizzled with olive oil. That’s hardly cooking, of course, that’s just moving a few things off the countertop and onto a plate; however, I do see the point that a “recipe” like that does depend entirely on the quality of ingredients selected; use grocery tomatoes and cheap olive oil, and the whole thing is a goner, along with your reputation.

But then, shouldn’t the real term be “quality-driven shopping”? Mind you, it would be well nigh impossible to expect that trend to sweep the nation because unless you live in a rural Italian village or, say, on a farm on Salt Spring Island, good ingredients are extremely difficult to come by. I haven’t had an apple that tasted like an apple since the last time I went to rural France. And don’t get me started on the demise of wild blueberries in this country or I might start to cry.

If I were asked to identify a hot trend in food today, I might skip “ingredient-driven cooking,” and point instead to “the ubiquitous and uncontested sale of absolute crap.” But that wouldn’t be very ladylike.

As for “technique-driven cooking” (by which, I suppose, classical French or this contemporary molecular business is intended: chef cooking, in other words), it is absolutely pointless unless you use the same quality ingredients as those required for so-called “ingredient-driven cooking” (as any chef worth his salt will be quick to argue). No amount of wizardry, however dazzling, can make a bad chicken breast taste like a good one. This is not to dismiss the importance of technique, obviously: bad technique can likewise massacre a perfectly good green bean. So, where does that leave us? At the end of the day, it means good cooking is good cooking, no? High-end or familial, either style has the same requirements: first of all, a nose for (and access to) excellent, real ingredients; second, a solid notion of how to prepare them, whether simply or with ingenuity and flourish.

The beloved 20th-century English food writer Elizabeth David often bemoaned the scarcity of what she called “honest cooking.” She was usually referring to the kind of food served in hotel restaurants, unnecessarily fussed with and fancied up. That’s a bit of a party-pooper attitude when taken to the extreme and applied across the board. There is value (and joy!) in experimentation and indeed in applying high techniques to food. I believe we need haute cuisine as much as we do boiled potatoes, and that there’s enough room in the world to accommodate both Ferran Adria and Alice Waters (although perhaps not enough room in the same actual room…).

In any case, I have found myself chewing on E. David’s term “honest cooking” or “honest food” almost daily lately – mainly because, daily, I run into the exact opposite: dishonest food. The martini by the name of “red square” which I was served in a bar last week and which claimed to contain cranberry juice, was, in fact, made from a disgusting pseudo-cranberry syrup. It tasted the way fluoride treatments used to in the 1970s. How many times have you ordered fruit pie with cream in a restaurant, only to be served some synthetic whipped topping with all the gustatory merits of window caulking? A jar of puréed grass in vegetable oil may be sold as pesto, without any apparent consequence to the manufacturer. And a word like “free-range,” if it ever meant anything, is an outright lie 99 per cent of the time. I don’t know about trends, but it seems to me right now that any semblance of morality in the world of food is decidedly “last week.” What depresses me is how few people seem to mind.

I’m looking around the city – in the grocery store, in the restaurants, at the market, in the street – and I’m trying to spot the trends. I see a lot of violently caffeinated and sugary “energy” drinks; gourmet crackers at $8.50 a box; fleets of appetizer-portion plates masquerading as dinner; high-end restaurant décor (and comfort level) to rival any high-school cafeteria; bottled water ad infinitum; induction stovetops (and, worse, digitalized stoves), the sweeping proliferation of so-called “organic” fruits and vegetables (another unconscionable falsehood); something called (God help us) a “gumwich.” Oh the trends, the trends, the trends, my friends!

I’m clearly a bigger party pooper than Elizabeth David ever was, because all I can think in the face of these trends is: if this is what’s “in,” count me out. The one consolation I cling to is the perennial promise that, “what goes around comes around.” I notice that exactly the same model of eye-glasses that my grandfather used to wear (the thick, black-rimmed, Revenge of the Nerds type) is back in vogue. So, who knows, there may still be hope for the revival of “honest food” one day! If it happens, it will be a big, big moment for me. It will be the first time in my life I ever get accused of being trendy.