James Martin has called for one staple cooking ingredient to be “banned”.

The celebrity chef, 50, called margarine “horrendous” and “two elements away from plastic” and has called for it to be axed from shops.

The former Saturday Kitchen host said that people are not aware of the “hidden” ingredients in margarine.

He told The Sunday Post: “Margarine should be banned. It’s dreadful, dreadful stuff, it’s two elements away from plastic, it’s horrendous stuff. It’s the ready-made food, it’s the packet food, the hidden salt, hidden fat. That’s the problem in this country.”

Martin added that he prefers full-fat milk, butter and cream since he is a “farmer’s kid”. He added that there was no semi-skimmed milk in his house growing up.

“That’s the problem in this country. It’s not the butter in a butter block or butter you put on your toast,” he added.

After leaving BBC’s Saturday Kitchen followinga decade of fronting the show, Martin moved to ITV and became the host of James Martin’s Saturday Morning in 2017.

Elsewhere in the interview, Martin recalled his attempt at making his own packed lunches when he was young.

“I’d have buttered white sliced bread and mashed-up banana with a Cadbury Flake on it, press it down, wrap it in cling film,” he said.

“Then you get to lunchtime and it would sort of look– when it was out the cling film – almost like a tennis ball. It would be all congealed together. But you managed to eat it. Nobody wanted to swap with me, but it was proper.”

Martin has now released his own cookbook titled Butter, which shared 130 recipes containing what he celebrates as the “world’s greatest ingredient”.

In the book’s foreword, he wrote that we often “take for granted” the butter that binds recipes together.

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