There's a new dividing line in olives: between those who prefer Nocellara to all other varieties, and the people who have never tasted them.

The dividing line for Yisrael Beiteinu is who supports terror and who fights terror.

The more people get advised to eat vegetables, the less it seems they wish to eat them. And it is quite a natural response. So I've said that the main way that we get to like food is through being exposed to them, but there's a second condition. We have to be exposed to them without feeling any sense of coercion.

Learning to cook in the 1990s, I thought 'proper olives' meant black. The benchmark was Kalamata from Greece: purple-black with an almost mushroomy depth of flavour. Other fine examples were tiny Coquilles from Nice and plump round Tanches from Nyons.

Sometimes the buzz of reading about others eating comes from the voyeuristic thrill of seeing how the other half lives: the gold leaf and truffles or - in the case of Trimalchio's feast in Petronius' 'Satyricon' - the dormice and honey.

The comeback of true green olives was part of a Spanish food revival in the early 2000s. I credit Sam and Sam Clark of Moro Restaurant in London with making them cool again.