STEPHEN DAVY-OSBORNE meets restaurant critic Jay Rayner who will be unveiling his ten food commandments at his hotly anticipated one man show

FORGET knives and forks - and you can close that food waste bin straight away. Because we are missing a trick or two when it comes to our mealtimes.

Heralding a food revolution worthy of Moses himself, award-winning restaurant critic and journalist Jay Rayner will arrive in town next week to decree his ten food commandments. And if ticket sales to his hotly-anticipated show at the Arts Centre are anything to go by, he already has quite the following.

Having risen to fame on our TV screens as a judge on Masterchef and becoming the voice of true fine dining within the Observer’s pages for more than 20 years, Jay knows a thing or two about what ticks in the kitchen.

Having penned a number of works of fiction from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s he has of late been focussing on his non-fiction work, including The Man Who Ate The World in 2008 and A Greedy Man in a Hungry World: How (Almost) Everything You Thought You Knew About Food Is Wrong in 2014 . Now he has returned with The Ten (Food) Commandments, as well as a brand new show to accompany the book.

“I suppose you would call them essays based on each one of my commandments which investigate the way we eat now,” he said, when discussing the upcoming show in Swindon on October 20. “It kicks off with Thou Shalt Eat With Thy Hands, which talks about the pleasures of eating with your hands. We are bound by certain social norms and sometimes we forget the absolute pleasure of eating with your hands because it brings into play the sense of touch. Normally when we eat we use the sense of smell, sight and taste. You bring in another sense when you eat with your hands.”

While bound by these Ten Commandments, the show is essentially over an hour of stand-up comedy, in which he employs audio-visual tools on stage as well as inviting his audience to put forward their own commandments.

“It’s a brilliant way to start a conversation and that’s what I like to think my shows are – they are a conversation with the audience,” he said. “I took little footsteps towards this. I published a book in 2013 about food security and the definition of sustainability.

“Often the middle classes – bless ‘em – get sustainability wrong. Although the book was written with - I hope a light touch and was entertaining - I knew that what I had written was the kind of book that ends up being fodder for discussion panels at literary festivals where everyone sits around on stage earnestly arguing opposing views. I hate them. I hate discussion panels with a passion because I don’t think you ever get to the nub of anything because everyone just takes different positions.

“So I thought how do I avoid doing discussion panels? The conclusion was I have to come up with a one man show that is self-contained that I can offer to the organisers and it quickly became rather a success and was booked into small theatres all over.”

But when he reached the point of thinking he should probably retire the show as the book had been out for a while he realised it had become a huge part of his life. Now he finds himself back on the road and stirring up quite the discussion on how we approach our food.

“I love it because it is mine, if that doesn’t sound too bold,” he said. “I write the show and the book, I direct myself – I came up with the whole concept and it succeeds or fails on me, so if it goes badly it is nobody else’s fault, just mine and if it goes well its mine too. It is quite liberating but it is also a high wire act.”

Even if the show does pan with the critics (which it certainly hasn’t) it’s fair to say that this critic is well-prepared to take any criticism that comes his way.

“I have written books for 25 years, novels and non-fiction and I take no issue with anything anyone says about me,” he pondered. “People know me as a food writer but in my time I have written about literally everything except sport, of which I have no interest - though I did once cover the all-natural amateur bodybuilding championships – those people who paint themselves orange and look like condoms filled with walnuts.

“It is a huge privilege to make part of your living as a writer and so once you put it out there you just have to let people say what they want to say. That’s how it works. I keep in mind that one must be careful in taking too much pleasure from the positive reviews because if you take pleasure from the positive reviews you also have to take the negative reviews on the chin as well.

“I had an interesting experience last year where my piano playing was reviewed by a jazz critic and that was much more personal, but even then I just had to accept whatever was going to happen was going to happen.”

Jay Rayner will be at The Arts Centre on Devizes Road on Thursday, October 20.