"If people take the time to cook beans and put it on
toast, why shouldn't we cut the process for them?" asked Heinz CEO Bill Johnson, presumably rhetorically, but let's answer him anyway. First of all, you don't cook baked beans; they're already cooked. You just heat them up a little, either on the stove or in a microwave, which takes about the time it takes to make the toast. There is no meaningful gain to be made timewise. Second, the new frozen product may be many things - "You would know it as a Pop Tart, almost," says Johnson - but it is not baked beans on toast. The competition isn't necessarily worried. Steve Marinker from Premier Foods, which makes Branston Baked Beans, said: "I don't think there will be a large demand for super-convenience products ... I can well imagine that there'll be different ways of bringing complete meals to people in an instant, but do people want this level of convenience?" Bill Johnson says his company needs to give people "new ways to use beans", as if he were answering some kind of outcry: Give us more ways to use your beans! We've run out of ideas!

Baked beans lie at the focal point of Britain's weird relationship with food. They're an American invention, a sickly tomatoey version of the classic dish, which may or may not be Native American in origin - but only in the UK are they held up as some kind of culinary tradition. They can sometimes baffle foreigners: a colleague tells of a Chilean refugee who was so confused by the sweet sauce which dowsed the haricot beans that he ran them under the tap. By some estimates, Britons buy 97% of the world's tinned baked beans. In recent years, Heinz has tried to rebrand baked beans as a healthy food - although a 400g tin contains about 20g of sugar and a good deal of salt - while it has also introduced Mexican and Indian-flavoured beans and baked bean pizza. When Jamie Oliver created a £7 baked bean starter dish for his restaurant Fifteen, this supper-of-last-resort gained some gourmet credibility, although it transpired that Heinz had bribed Oliver with a £15,000 payment to do it as a marketing exercise, and Oliver subsequently repudiated the whole episode, saying: "I should have been brighter. Baked beans have got absolutely no place in any restaurant with integrity."

**shame**

When manufacturers speak of "value-added" products, they generally mean the opposite: they're actually looking for ways to add cost to things you've been buying happily for years, ostensibly by creating convenience. Thus they add a pinch of oregano, and some salt and sugar, to tinned chopped tomatoes and charge an extra 10p. Baked beans manufacturers, upon hearing that consumers like to add chilli or spices to their beans, now add it on your behalf. It isn't as nice, of course, but it's much easier for you.

But does the convenience outweigh the cost? How busy do you have to be to need precooked rice? What are you going to do with the extra nine minutes? Let's bear in mind that rice simmering on the stove does not require the sort of concentration that's going to spoil the last bit of EastEnders. The value added here, from the consumer's point of view, is virtually nil. The cost, however, is considerable. Ordinary, unadulterated, precooked rice sells at about £5 per kilo, as opposed to 84p for the normal, just-add-water-and-cook sort.

Here's a trick question: what's the most expensive type of parmesan cheese you can buy in a supermarket? Taste the Difference? Tesco's finest? Jamie Oliver-sourced? The answer is the pre-shaved kind, which costs a whopping £25 per kilo. For that money you could import the best parmesan Italy has to offer, but then you'd have to shave it yourself. This is not a product born of convenience. Nobody is that time-poor. It's a testament to our unmitigated sloth.

The current exchange rate is about £1 to €1.40.

Now, it is obvious why the food manufacturers are doing this: The money they are making is quite phenomenal. But why  are people. It is often said, by cultural commentators that people are now cash rich, but time poor. I wonder whether this cultural archetype is an actuality or something that is aspirational. People actually do have the time to cook but they don't because they want to be the sort of person who doesn't have the time.

Or maybe they just don't know how to cook and big business is just exploiting that.