I HAVE enjoyed the ''Tried and Tested'' series of articles but find today's ''It's in the bag and no bones about it'' a maddening example of misdirected consumerism.

All right, most of your readers can afford to buy soup but surely most of your readers are not accountants, maths teachers, or arithmetical wizards - how can an ordinary human being compare prices per pint, litre, and gramme?

And who, other than someone with no sense at all, would compare vegetable soup with salmon and dill? You might as well compare a mutton pie with a chicken vol-au-vent; if it were an occasion for one it would not be an occasion for the other.

I have cooked for a farming family for 40 years and use my share of packets and tins but I still balk at the price of ''fresh'' soups: #1.89 a pint (568ml is a pint on my measuring jug) and it isn't even alcoholic!

Not many mothers would have made spicy sweet potato and butternut squash soup but a pint of leek and potato would take a leek, a potato, a stock cube, a pint of water, and half an hour - less in a microwave. I could make half a gallon of soup for less than 50p - how much would that be a gramme?

Those of us who cook fresh food every day for our families do still exist. Cooking seems to me to relegated by the media to the status of a middle-class hobby. The attitude seems to be that poor people use tins and rich people go to Marks & Spencer.

Joyce Hunter Blair,

Marbrack, Carsphairn,

Castle Douglas.

May 7.