Save us from panettone – the festive delicacy nobody likes

Part 4 in my Garbage I wrote for the Guardian series

Fist published in that rag on 24th December 2013

We all know about food fads. I eat out a fair bit and love restaurants, so every now and again an ingredient or cooking style leaps out at me shouting "affectation!" This year pickling everything from baby vegetables to pigs ears has been on trend as has, for some time now, cooking "sous vide" , where a piece of meat or fish is cooked very slowly in tepid water for a very long time and comes out looking like the flayed skin by a road traffic accident.

Then there's quinoa, which is bought by people with more money than sense. It looks like the cheap gruel that poor people have no choice but to eat as a staple, and, in the Peruvian Andes that is exactly what it was. With its grain-like consistency it is considered by the uber-cool food gang a "superfood". It is gluten-free, which suits those who are not actually gluten intolerant but nonetheless sashay into whole food gaffes with their rolled-up skinny jeans and Rapunzel beards demanding wheat-free coffee. In time-honoured fashion, something that low-income folk would love to see the back of in favour of more luxurious items, has been appropriated by the trendy urban mob. And it tastes of wallpaper scrapings.

Cupcakes, meanwhile, with their indifferent sponge and over-sweet toppings are twee and boring, and yet they get their own cafes, shops and sections in Selfridges Food Hall. No doubt those women on permanent diets have designated chocolate very last season and classed cupcakes as their new "guilty pleasure".

But the fad that really tests my tastebuds at this time of year is panettone, the Italian part-bread, part-cake monstrosity that fills the shelves of every Italian deli and supermarket throughout November and December, and is, inevitably on sale for a knock-down price right up until spring. It is, for some inexplicable reason, packed in plastic, then encased in a box you could fit a family of four in. It takes up every spare inch of space as you will know if you have ever had the misfortune to buy or be given one, and it tastes like Gandhi's flip-flop after three months in the desert.

No one actually likes this so-called Christmas delicacy, but few will admit it. Folk lumbered with one will go to great lengths to disguise it - you only have to look up "recipes for panettone" to see what I mean - panettone French toast. Panettone trifle. Toasted panettone. Panettone bread pudding. No wonder it has to be lashed with booze and cream. I am deeply suspicious of any food item that is only ever wheeled out once a year. If it was so good we would be eating it all the time.

I always seem to get a panettone given to me at Christmas, possibly because I am known to love the food of Italy. But panettone tastes about as Italian as ham and pineapple thick-crust pizza.

Last year I took the unwanted item to a neighbour when invited round for a seasonal drink and she begged me to take it away because it was too big to chuck in the bin. I tried to offload it on a bloke I am friendly with who sells the Big Issue and he more or less gave me the finger. Panettone is like Terminator 2 or Freddy Kruger. For all the time I have spent in Italy over the new year holiday season I have never EVER seen anyone eating this monstrosity.

If panettone is full of hot air, you have to be a fruit cake to like stollen, the German cake that may take over from panettone soon as the latest food craze. It is heavy, dense, and full of medicinal-tasting dried fruit, plastic almond paste, and enough icing sugar to make your dentist rich.

But do the food faddists mind? Not a bit. What matters is that these items are à la mode. You really are what you eat.