The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday April 8 2007

We should clarify that Professor Tim Lang, mentioned below, did not found the London Food Commission. He was its first director; Robin Jenkins founded it. Similarly, Prof Lang was a founding member and latterly chair of the National Food Alliance, forerunner of Sustain. Jeanette Longfield was its founder.

It's Awards time and thank you to everyone who voted in this year's OFM Food Awards. It means so much to everyone involved. The OFM Awards were set up to recognise producers, shopkeepers, restaurants and those within the industry who don't normally get to win awards, either because they aren't high profile enough, they are too busy doing what they do to enter or because they work in an area that other awards just don't reach. And apart from a few that the judges themselves single out, the majority of the winners are decided on by you, our readers.

This year your votes have recognised people and places the length and breadth of the country, from a very special bakery in Edinburgh to a farm shop in deepest Devon, a bargain breakfast in Bristol and an eco-restaurant in King's Cross. What is perhaps unsurprising is how varied so many of the nominations have been. It would be difficult to think of two more different places to eat than Canteen in Spitalfields and Maze in London's Grosvenor Square. One the very soul of understatement, the other the sort of place you expect to bump into, say, Tanya Turner from Footballers' Wives.

The Judges' Awards are generally for those whose work is done away from the eye of the general public. We prepare our shortlists and then meet up and fight it out over lunch. (Well of course we do it over lunch, we do everything over lunch.) This year we were joined by restaurateur Tom Conran, writer and journalist Joanna Blythman, Robbie James from Waitrose, the River Café's Ruth Rogers, still sporting injuries after being knocked off her bike on her regular cycle to work, and a particularly boisterous Jay Rayner.

There was one award no one argued over. This year's Hall Of Fame Award goes to Tim Lang, professor of Food Policy at London's City University. Professor Lang works way beyond the art of poetry of food, being founder and director of the London Food Commission, which did some of the earliest work on additives, the effect of food poverty among those on low incomes and was the first to highlight the damage being done to both school and hospital meals by the Tory government. He literally invented the term 'food miles'. To list his achievements would take more space than I have here, but his honour was unanimous among the judges and many of us felt his recognition was quite overdue.

Thanks go to our judges and many congratulations to all our winners and runners-up this year (and thank you very much to all those who voted yet again for The Kitchen Diaries.) I wish you could all be there to see the winners' faces when they get their awards. To see how much it means to have your work appreciated, not just for those who own the shops and restaurants but everyone working quietly behind the scenes, every day, come rain or shine. On their behalf, I would like say thank you to everyone who took the trouble to vote.