The government gets a lot of flak over food policy sometimes rightly so, you might say.

However, War On Want set a new bar for furious rhetoric when it this week branded our political masters a “central cause for global hunger”. And Blogof had just thought ‘size zero’ was back in fashion this autumn in less developed parts of the world.

“Hundreds of millions of people face starvation as a result of British government policy,” the body claimed in a new report, pointing to the G8’s free-market stance over the 2008 food crisis rather than the amount personally guzzled by Eric ‘Bring Out the Branston’ Pickles.

The timing was interesting, coming just days after Whitehall mandarins started telling us Brits we needed to eat five billion fewer calories a day (collectively, not each, despite what the Daily Mail reported). That’s the equivalent of 17 million cheeseburgers, according to resident health Double Whopper Andrew Lansley enough cheeseburgers to provide the GDA of certain key vitamins and minerals to almost 17 whole people.

Whether Whitehall presses on with plans to send the recouped burgers to nations lacking the inspired economic leadership we get here is unknown.