On the whole, I prefer wating out with women. The gossip is usually more salacious, the stories downright dirtier and they tend to spend more money on wine. Maybe it's just the women I know, but we always seem to eat better, too. It is they, rather than the guys, who will happily order an extra starter or main course 'out of interest' to have in the middle of the table. They are more likely to have a pudding and rarely grumble about the size of the bill. Then again, maybe I just hang out with women with insatiable appetites.

I do think they have a slightly different relationship with food, being more inquisitive, less squeamish (I know six men who won't touch offal but only two women) and generally more adventurous. In my experience it is now the blokes who refuse to eat something because they are watching their weight (No really, I mustn't), and inevitably it is the men who forego another bottle on the grounds they have to have to be up in the morning.

So where is the salad-and-no-pudding woman? The one who is always on a diet, who pushes food around her plate? I am sure she is still out there, because everything I read tells me so, it is simply I haven't come across one of them recently.

While men in the food world seem to get all the publicity it is often the women who are quietly making the real difference. Alice Waters changed the face of America's restaurants with her legendary Chez Panisse, the first place to employ foragers to find unusual salad ingredients and to champion organic food before it was fashionable; Alpha cooks Ruthie Rogers and Rose Gray, whose insistence on sourcing the finest ingredients and cooking them with respect, have changed the way we eat in Britain; the dietician who is making the nation think about what we are doing to their bodies by eating badly. The difference is that while the guys (come on, we all know the culprits) make a great song and dance about everything, it is the women who are rolling up their sleeves and getting on with it. And that is what this month's OFM is here to celebrate.

· Nigel Slater is The Observer's cookery writer.