Theodore Dalrymple lampoons the 21st-century eating habits of the British masses in his March Quadrant essay.
Nor is his mother, whose only acquaintance with an oven is of the microwave variety, likely to buy sardines however cheap they might be. You can lead a British woman to a kitchen, but you can’t make her cook.
While living in UK for a few years (I am from Romania), I worked for a couple of years as a Probation Officer, doing mainly home visits to football hooligans and small-time weed dealers (they were all actually very nice in their home environment). Some of them had never seen their mothers cook a meal from scratch (those were also mothers who did not go to work). Of course, they never had a dining table but some meals were taken together off laps or coffee tables in front of TVs (Chinese or Indian take-aways). I once met a woman who believed she home-cooked because she boiled shop bought pasta and poured a ready-made sauce from a jar on it.