JUST when you think you can put your feet up on a Sunday afternoon, you pick up the paper and read the most appalling dung cart of old wallop.

I quote from a piece by the supercool, upmarket, pesto and Evian leftie Margarette Driscoll: "The apparent slimming of Britain today hides the real story of a divided nation. While Jeremy and Jemima pore over the Parma ham in Kensington, less fortunate couples are scouring the supermarkets of Middlesbrough for the plain white economy packaging that denotes cheap bumper packs of processed foods laden with fat and sugar: pizza, chips, white bread, tinned spaghetti, crisps and fizzy drinks are their staple diet."

Driscoll calls this the "new class gap". But it's not a class gap - just an intelligence gap. Those so-called "less fortunate" couples who trawl the supermarkets in search of instant processed foods are probably paying more for their meals than the rich trendies who allegedly eat more healthily. The idea that poor people cannot find healthy cheap food - and so are condemned to obesity - is simply a lie. It is more than a lie - it is a species of the nasty ideological prejudice which requires for its political success the permanent existence of a supposedly stupid working class.

But ordinary working people are not stupid. I was brought up by a grandmother in the late 1940s and she knew how to make a little go a long way. I would humbly point out to the likes of Margarette Driscoll that with a minute's thought one can still live very cheaply and at the same time enjoy a healthy diet. For example, get a supermarket chicken for no more than £3. Get a big bag of potatoes for no more than a quid. Buy a large cauliflower for less than a quid. Day one: roast the chicken and some potatoes with it. Cook the cauliflower in the chicken fat and serve with a gravy made from the chicken fat and a stock cube. That's a tasty meal for two as cheap as you can get.

You will not have eaten the whole chicken in one go. So, day two: try cold chicken and home made chips - not the expensive and tasteless "oven chips" variety - with the rest of the cauliflower spiced up with hot Tabasco sauce. Day three: there will be the last of the chicken. Cut it up, fry it in onions and garlic and serve with brown rice. Day four: the chicken has at last run out. Ask the butcher for some liver or kidneys and fry these gently in butter before serving with coriander and grilled tomatoes.

Extremely delightful staple foods come cheap. Tins of tomatoes are sometimes as little as ten pence a time. Sardines in oil for about 30p. Spuds are cheap and so are large wholemeal loaves. Go to the Asian supermarket and stock up very cheaply on basmati rice and naan breads.

I despise this class-ridden propaganda about what the poor can afford to eat and what they can't. Such is the variety and plentifulness of cheap, good ingredients these days that you can eat like a king on less than what used to be earned by an industrial labourer. Anybody can do it. You don't have to be a processed food junkie just because you're not as well off as politicos such as Ms Driscoll.

*Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange