OVER the festive season and a week into the new year, I have officially become a permanent member of the fat community.

This is not the same as the occasionally porky community, which sometimes socialises with the slightly-less-porky-after-a-diet community, and it has been recognised as a genuine part of this country’s community of communities.

Food wise, this includes the vegan community, which is tipped to become the top community of 2019 now that the baker Greggs has launched its vegan sausage roll, the militant vegan community, which stands and protests in the meat aisle of Waitrose in Brighton, the vegetarian community, which is largely calm and collected, the flexitarian community, which eats what it likes when it likes, and any other foodie fashion or fad community that’s going.

Yes, even our food choices are now ridiculously described as a “community”, which means that it’s assumed that all members of these communities are the same and believe in the same things and all know each other. This is blatantly untrue, as I know from experience. My vegan daughter knows very few other vegans.

The truth is that we are all members of the food-eating community and in 2019 we are all going to have to take a serious look at what we are eating. At the weekend, it was revealed that our levels of obesity have reached such a peak that in 2017/18 more than 41,000 people needed hip or knee operations because of their weight. Our eating habits are putting an intolerable strain on the NHS.

Last week there was a furore when the Royal College of Physicians suggested that obesity should be recognised as a disease rather than a lifestyle choice, or obesity levels will never go down, they warned. I think it’s both (please understand that I am not a medical expert). Bad eating and overeating are lifestyle choices in the first place but disease is the long-term consequence of making those choices.

Part of the problem is that as a society we are obsessed with food. Unhealthily obsessed with food. It’s everywhere, not just in food shops but in every other outlet too.

It is thrown at us relentlessly, in ads everywhere you look, on the dozens of food shows on TV, and in every publication where pages are filled with ever more complicated recipes by TV chefs elevated to the status of food gods.

We have too much food because we are a rich country. Witness the amount of wasted food we throw away. We can afford to import the produce of countries anywhere on the globe in order to make those ever more complicated dishes and ever more tasty processed foods. It seems the more food choice we have, the worse choices we make. And we can see the result in our waistlines.

The more types of food we have to choose from, the more splintered we become within the food-eating community. We are dividing into specialised groups that are becoming increasingly angry with each other for making their own choices. Meat-eaters just don’t get vegans (“It’s a fad”) and some vegans hate meat-eaters, hence their militant protests.

Meat-eaters resent being hectored by “self-righteous” vegetarians and vegans for making “wrong” and “unethical” food choices and vegans feel very strongly that meat-eaters are responsible for cruelty to farm animals.

One way of looking at it is that both traditional and more recent food production methods are coming under rigorous scrutiny, and perhaps it’s about time they did. One reason our food choices have become so appalling is food’s addictiveness due to all of those little hidden extras they contain: the hormones they pump into the animals we eat and the chemicals and sugar they add to processed foods. Could they possibly in any way have any effect on our compulsion to overeat? Allowing this contamination of food to happen is down to successive governments and the lobbyists from the food and drink producers, whose representatives have been able to sit on the very committees making the decisions.

Will Brexit make a difference to our food production methods and import choices? Out of the control of unaccountable Eurocrats, I hope so.

Perhaps Britons simply won’t have access to all the exotic foods they have become used to, when a newly-discovered food suddenly becomes the new “superfood”.

Perhaps Brexit will help take us back to food basics and we will re-learn to eat home-grown root vegetables and fruit when they’re in season, intensive livestock production farms will become illegal and the pumping of chemicals into farm animals will stop. We’ll all be much healthier...and thinner.