Our heads tell us kale, but our hearts crave a fry-up

LET US travel back in time to the early 1980s, to the days when we drank Tennent's with pictures of Lager Lovelies on the back of the cans and children were raised on Spangles and Creamola Foam.

Back then, parmesan cheese was a sickly smelling dust in plastic containers, not fresh chunks of Parmigiano Reggiano. Ham sweated in tins and was never wafer-thin air-dried slices from Bayonne. Olive oil was sold in the chemist to ease earwax, not drizzled on ciabatta in extra-virgin pressings from Tuscany. Back then, Scottish food was mostly foul.

In the prehistoric days when foreign ingredients began to make their breakthrough, I took a job in a fancy new delicatessen in Byres Road in the West End of Glasgow. It was called "Guy's Delicatessen", the first in the area, and a sight to behold. Wifies in hairy coats up from Partick would stand before its exotic refrigerated window, a mixture of amazement and righteous disgust on their faces, and stare at the exquisitely splayed lobsters decorated with strawberries and slices of kiwi. "What is that wee funny green fruit with they black dots in it?" they asked each other. "Have you seen the prices?" they demanded, and kept their handbags firmly clasped shut.

Inside, some of the weird foodstuffs puzzled me, too. I had been raised largely on mince and tatties in Dalmuir and taken a few Spanish package holidays, but I had no idea that unpasteurised Brie de Meaux was supposed to run all over the plate like that. And it was bowffin. I was just about to toss it in the bin when Guy, the deli owner, told me: "No, it's meant to be runny like that. It's at its peak, it's perfect." As for the grey cheese covered in nettle leaves, well, that was equally suspicious. "Yarg," he said. "Gray spelled backwards. From the Duchy of Cornwall," said Guy.

Royal cheese. We didn't like that. My fellow deli workers were a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party who went out to sell her newspaper to students at lunchtime, an intellectual lesbian from Anniesland, and an enterprising lad from Drumchapel on the Youth Opportunities Programme who fuelled himself with Benylin. If anyone needed a culinary education, it was us. And most of the Glaswegians that came in.

"What the hell is that?" they would say, pointing at a bright pink salami with squares of white fat in it. "Mortadella," we answered. "What's it made from?" asked the customers. "Donkey meat?" we guessed. Guy had gone to the pub, so we just did our best.

Gradually, regular customers began to come in for pots of taramasalata, wild boar paté, Japanese pickles, kalamata olives and curious unpasteurised cheeses. Glasgow's Italian community delighted in the shop, knowing exactly what to order and precisely how thin their prosciutto should be sliced. There was always a large order that went up to the not-size-zero nuns at Notre Dame. And there were a few people, world travellers, West End sophisticates or snobs, who would even manage to ask for bizarre foodstuffs we didn't stock.

Many years on, that wonderful education in the deli and those foods from mysterious, faraway places resurfaced in my mind when I was in the middle of writing a novel, West Coast. It's the story which begins in Argyll in the 1970s and tells of a working-class fisherman's son who eventually becomes a major figure on the Britart scene. It's about changing class and country, and sometimes regretting it. In writing about class, I realised how much a part food plays in it, particularly in Scotland.

Now, through television, we would appear to be one gastronomically sophisticated nation under Scots such as Nick Nairn and Gordon Ramsay. We have all taken Gillian McKeith's medicine, and are armed with knowledge of the goodness of greens and oily fish. The fact is, however, we still eat bacon butties. Food critic Giles Coren wrote "you never see a person with a degree eating a fry-up"; of course he was absolutely wrong. If he'd added the words "every day" he might have been nearer the truth.

But though most Scots have the right information about healthy food, we seem to be reluctant to put it into our stomachs. No wonder we are the second fattest nation on Earth after the Americans. A recent study of children at 47 Scottish schools by scientists from St Andrews, Dundee and Glasgow Caledonian universities showed that low-income children have the same problems of stunted growth and obesity as children in developing countries. The poorer Scots children are often obese, but the quality of the food consumed is so appalling that they are also over a centimetre shorter than their peers.

The survey shocked me: I thought I'd been writing nostalgically about the crap food of the 1970s and 80s in my novel, but it turned out much of the fiction was still fact. It was just that the middle classes had moved on, leaving the economically deprived behind. Years ago, middle-class Scots differentiated themselves from the rest by buying Mother's Pride "pan" (soft crust) loaves, rather than the cheaper "plain" version. Now, they try to eschew all mass-produced white bread, favouring wholemeal brown or "artisanal" whites.

In West Coast, the characters mostly live on Milanda pan loaves. "Demanda Milanda" went the advert. They also have an unhealthy appetite for Ambrosia creamed rice, Golden Wonder crisps, Walnut Whips, Vimto and tins of Golden Syrup pudding. Entire packs of Tunnock's caramel wafers are consumed in single scenes. When not dining from the chippie, the characters bring home that thrilling new invention: Vesta boil-in-the-bag chicken curry, consumed in front of the telly. The tiny Co-op supermarket, the only source of food in the imaginary fishing port, does have root vegetables, but the only salad ingredient is Heinz Salad Cream and the locals are still unsure whether broccoli should be green and crisp, or soft and yellowing.

Now, of course, the Co-op – to go by my regular shopping in the Lochgilphead branch in Argyll – is making heroic attempts to bring organic vegetables and Fair Trade products to its customers, at not-ridiculous prices. Good food, even far from big cities, is there for the eating. Next to a copious sweetie aisle.

Of course, there were pockets of exotica even in the 70s. The story's protagonist, Fergus MacFarlane, tries to better himself as a boy by learning to cook fancy food with his Uncle Jim, who specialises in making "asparagus roulade", spears of floppy tinned asparagus wrapped in rolls of thin pink ham, with cheese sauce poured on top, then baked in the oven. "It was magic, and stayed warm on the hostess trolley while Jim served sherry and whisky to his guests, Mr and Mrs Catani, who appreciated foreign food. Fergus was allowed to bring in the pudding he'd helped make: Black Forest Trifle, using a whole tin of black cherries in syrup and fresh whipped cream, not the UHT stuff."

Now both these dishes are illegal in polite circles, hostess trolleys can only be found in skips and the middle classes would never eat asparagus or cherries from tins! Out of season!

In fiction, the teenage Fergus moves on from Black Forest Trifle to working in the first delicatessen to open in the fishing port, a delicatessen with similar foodstuffs to Guy's – but a quite different plot. Fergus falls in love with the deli when he's given a slice of sausage. "It was hot and spicy, with a dark taste of blood, and of something exotically far away from the watery pink rubber version in the Co-op." It's León chorizo, with a rich, smoky aroma. Moist, meaty and paprika-laced, it leaves his taste buds in a frenzy. He can't go back to square sausage, ever.

Since then, Scotland has come full circle gastronomically. Having embraced the decadent lattés, chorizo, foie gras and Kenyan "French" beans, we are revisiting our culinary roots and abandoning pricey foreign delights. It is a return to Kailyard Cuisine. Just as the Kailyard school of writing rose at the end of the 19th century to provide "an overly sentimental representation of rural life, cleansed of real problems and issues that affected the people", the Scots are now embracing kail – or kale – at markets throughout the land.

Kale and parsnips are seen on trendy Edinburgh dinner tables like never before. Kale is considered a highly nutritious vegetable with powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Its taste is quite another matter…

Naturally, the dinner party veg is locally sourced, seasonal, with low food miles. There are extra points for green smugness if the produce comes from your own allotment or garden – or a farmers' market, which are now everywhere, from Unst to Kelso via Portree and Dundee.

Everyone is on the Kailyard Cuisine bandwagon. Alex Salmond vowed to eat only Scottish local produce for a week, and the television presenter Stephen Jardine has declared in this very paper that he and his family plan to eat only Scottish produce this year.

Thankfully, no-one needs to write a new cookbook for the native Kailyard Cuisine. In my researches into 70s food, I read A Taste of Scotland by Theodora Fitzgibbon, filled with seaweed and potato soup, wholemeal bread, mussel and onion stew, trout in oatmeal and Scotch broth. I found neeps, stovies, rumbledethumps and colcannon in Ena Baxter's Scottish Cookbook from 1974, with the author depicted on the cover wearing a tartan skirt and a big blouse. It doesn't get more fashionable than that.

• West Coast by Kate Muir is published by Headline Review. To order your copy of West Coast at the special price of £14.49 including p&p (RRP £16.99), please call 0870 755 2122 and quote offer code BSH640, or visit: www.pressoffers.co.uk/bsh640. Alternatively you can send a cheque made payable to Bookshop Partnership Ltd to: West Coast, Offer BSH640, PO Box 104, Ludlow, SY8 1YB. Please allow 28 days for delivery. Offer is subject to availability.

FOND MEMORIES, OR BEST FORGOTTEN?

VESTA BOIL-IN-THE-BAG CURRY

IN THE 1970s, when a handful of Indian restaurants dished up red-hot curries as an accompaniment to the excessive consumption of gassy beer, Vesta curries arrived on the scene, their plastic bags of flaccid rice and vomit-hued sauce mix not quite delivering the flavoursome exoticism promised on the alluring packet illustration.

CREAMOLA FOAM

NOW discontinued, the sherbet-like powder that came in a tin slaked the summer thirst of generations of children. Just ladle a few teaspoonfuls into a mug and hold under a tap, standpipe or waterfall, and an engaging cocktail of additives, including something called E999 Quillaia, ensured lots of froth. Turned your mouth a great colour, too.

PARMESAN CHEESE

LONG before we grated tastefully curling shavings of Parmigiano Reggiano over our pasta (and, no, not spaghetti hoops), parmesan would be dispensed like a shower of yellowing dandruff from a little plastic drum that mouldered in the pantry for months on end.

AMBROSIA CREAMED RICE

On the go since 1917 and much favoured by sad expats, this canned nectar of glutinous lumpiness is still about, but long before many of us had ever sampled rice in any other form, Ambrosia, inevitably served with tinned peaches, finished off many a Sunday dinner. You either loved it or loathed it.

VIMTO

VIMTO goes back a long way, a full century in fact. First manufactured in 1908 as a tonic – to give you "vim", the purple fruit drink was exported widely throughout the Empire during the 1920s and 30s. These days marketed with a "Shlurple the Purple" slogan, it can also be found in lollies and even Jammy Dodgers. Is there no end to the stuff?