From about the mid-1980s until the present day we have apparently been through a golden age of food in this country. Inspectors award clusters of stars and chestfuls of rosettes to restaurants that have interminable waiting lists for a table. The staple British dining — out experience of prawn cocktail, steak and Black Forest gateau (which still has its aficionados, radiating guilt and shame in the way of those who eat viande de cheval) was shunted off the cliff of fashion in favour of nouvelle cuisine, then the cuisine of Indo-China, then something called "fusion". Supermarkets competed with each other to supply exotic fruits and unheard-of vegetables. Sainsbury's started to stock ostrich. Supermarkets would not, though, routinely offer healthy British staples such as pheasant or partridge, in case a customer cracked a tooth on a piece of shot.

Food then developed its own pornography. We reached the stage, early in this century, when a different celebrity chef was on television each night offering his or her "take" on what to do with the richer-than-ever selection of goodies now to be found in your supermarket. Naively, I wondered at the popularity of these programmes, given not just the expense of (and, quite often, the difficulty in finding) some of the ingredients, but also the time and effort the dishes took to make. But then I realised that the people watching the programmes with such pleasure were usually not following through and making the dishes themselves. They were watching Delia, or Nigella, or Jamie, or Gordon with much the same attitude that some elderly men watch programmes featuring Miss Kelly Brook.

So here we have a paradox. We are more interested in food now than we have possibly ever been in our history. We seem to have an insatiable demand for television programmes, books, magazines and internet sites devoted to the subject. And yet we happily buy salt-packed, gristle-minced ready-made foods that may or may not contain what used to be someone's little pony — and yell in terror when the possibilities of what it contains are exposed to us. We have patronised supermarkets that retail this filth in a way that has driven butchers in some parts of the country almost to extinction. Many of our people do not blink at paying £8 for a packet of cigarettes but would be horrified to pay anything like that to feed themselves or their children.

This column tries to avoid politics — God knows there is enough of it out there — but the iniquity of the Common Agricultural Policy is preventing our farmers from doing the best job they can, and from providing the best food they can. Food standards, much talked about in recent weeks, are an EU competence, not a British one. We import more and more of our food, not just so we can eat strawberries in February and broad beans in November, but because economies of scale allow the retailer to sell his imports to the public at a price that satisfies their obsession with food. As the Victorians knew, and as we are now learning again, cheap food sooner or later equals adulterated food. We would do well to forsake the pornography of food, alter our economic priorities, and start creating reliable and edible dishes of our own.