The current vogue for noshtalgia - eating food that evokes the past - is surely on the brink of becoming an anachronism in its own lunchtime, for the cheaper "forgotten" ingredients involved, such as ox cheeks, beef skirt, suet, bone marrow and pig trotters have now become "du jour" on menus everywhere.

The D-Day 70th anniversary commemoration dishes featured in the TV series the Great British Menu, which finished yesterday, only prove the point, as they were as contemporary as they come.

And the popularity of Scots chef Tom Kitchin's heritage menu for John Lewis Edinburgh, available this month to mark the department store group's 150th anniversary, underlines the fact that there's an appetite for the healthier, homemade, nutritious food we used to eat.

Call it cucina povera, peasant food or austerity cuisine; what's sure is its place in the modern middle-class kitchen.

No doubt many foodies will be asking for the recipe for Kitchin's sheep's heid scotch broth, which I understand has been flying out of the pot, along with stargazy fish pie and Scottish strawberry fool.

Prices for these "cheaper" cuts are soaring. Isn't it ironic that it's mainly the well-heeled who can afford to indulge in the taste of lost times?

Strange, then, that the one item which doesn't show up in such look-back-with-longing menus is the chip, made from the humblest and cheapest of ingredients and eaten by the poorest in Scotland from the late 18th century (though evidence is sparse, it seems the chip, or french fry, was invented around 1802 and adopted in Britain in the mid 19th century).

Even so, I find it a bit rich for the author of a new cookbook to be inviting readers to post their earliest memories of eating chips.

By encouraging us to share our "emotional connection" to them, the implication is that deep-fried potato chips are a "forgotten" food worthy of inclusion in the noshtalgia wish-list. They're not. For better or for worse, they're a dietary staple that has never left us. And they're consumed by rich and poor alike in the street, the pub and the Michelin-starred restaurant.

Even so, we should brace ourselves for their gentrification and entry into top heritage menus alongside tripe, lambs' tongues and calves' liver.

According to Anne De La Forest, author of Frites, chips can be of the rarest potato varieties (the ancient Bintje, the Yukon gold, the Desiree). They might consist of vegetables other than potatoes: polenta, mashed peas, feta cheese, carrots, aubergines, courgettes with Parmesan and poppy seed, asparagus, turnips, parsnips, Comte cheese, pumpkin, sweet potato with cumin, beetroot, celeriac, salsify, black radish, butternut squash, kohlrabi; to sweeten the swallow they can also be made with sweet potato and sugar; banana and brown sugar; pears with praline, apples, or even french toast.

It all sounds very upscale when given such an attractive gourmet gloss; but it doesn't change the fact that, whatever they are made with, they're cooked by deep-frying in oil; the author disingenuously suggests olive, avocado, grapeseed, groundnut or sunflower oil. Trendy gastro-pubs triple-fry theirs; some even use beef dripping. You know, the stuff that hardens in the arteries.

Chips were arguably invented in France (apparently first served under the Pont Neuf during the French Revolution), where adult obesity is at 17 per cent and rising - and much higher in the Northern departments.

In Belgium, where chips are part of the national diet (the country contends it invented chips as long ago as the late 17th century), it's 22 per cent and rising; in the UK it's more than one-quarter and rising, though in Scotland, it's stabilised at 26 per cent. Obesity rates among children have grown even faster than among adults in the past 30 years.

And yet this - albeit beautifully produced - book begins with the imprecation, written in the French news magazine Le Point: "It would be cruel to take away from our children the one thing that sweetens a long day's study. If they cannot look forward to a good plate of frites, how can they properly swallow physics and chemistry or digest biology?" Served, presumably, with the "traditional" frite sauce of mayonnaise.

Yes, like you I'm salivating at the very thought. But if we're really to improve our diets by going back to the future it would be better, surely, to ditch the chips altogether and follow the golden rule: boiled is best.