I HAVE eaten chips all over the world and discovered Belgium is to be avoided because they dip theirs chips in mayonnaise, and America should be approached with caution because they call chips French fries. But that's America: a strange land with strange eating habits.

In this, National Chip Week, we should celebrate with pride what our national dish, for the British are famed for having chips with everything.

This fabled food could easily have been handed down by the gods from mount Olympus. The reality is chips came from Belgium, before they discovered mayonnaise.

When rivers froze and poor people couldn't fish, they fried potatoes instead. This method of preparation became popular on the continent and Thomas Jefferson, then US ambassador to France, became a fan. When he became President, he had “potatoes served in the French manner” at the White House. Belgium was being ignored even in 1802 and the term French fries was born.

In Britain, chips have naturally gone together with fish since Dickensian times. Fried fish sellers walked Victorian streets serving their wares with bread or baked potato.

The legend goes that John Lees was selling fried fish in Mossley Market, just over the tops in Lancashire in 1863. To cool the fat he would throw in sliced potatoes which he then gave away with the fish. When people started asking for just a bag of chips, he realised he was onto a winner.

Fish and chips became such a staple food of Britain that they were never rationed during the Second World War. They helped keep the home fires burning and defeat Hitler.

Since then, chips have become synonymous with Brits. America has hamburgers, Hungary has goulash, Austria has Wiener Schnitzel, the Ukraine has borscht, Greece has moussaka and the French have frogs legs which are very handy when telling a Parisian waiter to hop to the kitchen and bring you a bowl of chips.

In celebration, organisers of this national week have issued a number of those strange factoids whose relevance never quite seems to make sense. For instance, more than 1.6 million tonnes of potatoes are made into chips every year in the UK, they say, weighing the same as over 14,000 blue whales.

Yes, but the chips taste better.

The Great British public eat, in a year, almost three billion meals containing chips and aficionados include Kate Moss, who is as thin as a chip, so I am not alone in my passion for this wonderful food, a knowledge which soothes my conscience if not my arteries.

But now my Maris Pipers are chosen and await the knife, the fat is hotting up and my sirloin steak is sitting in the griddle pan. It's time to celebrate chip week.