Last month I was on a panel of 'experts' at a board awayday for a large regional brewer and pub operator. After being introduced to my fellow experts, realising that they really were experts in their respective fields and feeling like I was a fraud who had somehow sneaked in under a cloak of mistaken identity, I took my place with them on the stage and fielded an hour of questions from the great and good.
Being a beer writer, I spoke a lot about beer. And I was challenged almost immediately by the City banker, the marketing guru and the restaurant group owner who made up the rest of the panel. Why was I focusing on beer? That's just sentimental. This company had to realise that it was first and foremost a property owner.
Pubs had to start thinking more like restaurants, they agreed, and focus on food if they wanted to survive.
While I was happy fighting the beery corner, at one point the restaurant mogul did say something that made me realise he had a point.
He referred in passing to the incredible pace of change in the restaurant industry, how new cuisines and concepts are coming through at such a rapid pace, how the British palate has developed a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for novelty and variety.
The array of restaurants on the typical high street is completely different now from what it was a decade ago, he pointed out.
And then I thought about the typical pub menu.
When I first started eating in pubs in the mid-1980s, you had a typical choice of fish and chips, a burger, sausage and mash, steak and ale pie, and maybe steak and chips.
And if you wanted a veggie or healthy option, there might be a laughably overpriced Caesar salad (with or without chicken) that you ordered hopefully and received with a crushing sense of defeat when you realised the ocean of dressing and mountains of croutons meant it would probably have been more slimming to have had the burger.
The last time I looked at a pub menu, just last week, the choice was exactly the same.
The typical pub menu has not changed for at least a quarter of a century. We have 52,000 pubs, give or take, and in the ones that sell food (excluding gastropub restaurant wannabes) most of the menus are identical.
This represents a crushing lack of imagination, innovation or listening to customers. It's not that there's anything wrong with these dishes per se, but they form such a tiny, narrow sliver of what we now like to eat as a nation, and when they're all identical, and when there is simply no option of a nice, tasty meal that is going to be less than 75 per cent of your daily recommended intake of fat and calories, I suddenly realised why I find eating in pubs to be largely a depressing experience.
I'm not saying I want sashimi platters with my pint of ale. I'm not saying there is no merit in hearty fare, or traditional British dishes.
But when you look at almost any other aspect of pubs - décor, beer selection, ambience - there is incredible diversity as you roam the country, even within a single town.
I believe beer will continue to be vital to the future of the pub. But food is obviously going to be increasingly important to footfall, turnover and profitability. It would be great to see some evidence of this being reflected on the menu.