March of the megastores that cost me my butcher

But experience tells me meat from supermarkets has less flavour than that from a butcher. It's tough, or over-trimmed of fat, or it shrivels in the pan. At a supermarket, you're picking it off a shelf or buying from a meat counter assistant, not a proper butcher who can advise on cut, cooking method and quantity - always the most bewildering part.

Yesterday the Competition Commission ruled that supermarkets don't harm small shops. Does anyone really believe that? In the light of my missing butcher, not to mention the disappearing fishmongers and bakers, I'm sceptical. The report also claimed consumers get a good deal because prices stay down.

But anyone who cares about what they eat knows that low-cost food is missing the point. We don't need food in greater quantities - many of us are too fat - what we need is better quality produce. Take the £2 rotisserie chicken on sale in Waitrose on Sunday. It didn't compare, price-wise, to the one I'd just bought at the farmers' market, for £12. But at least I knew my farm chicken had a decent life, and its owner wasn't ripped off. It tasted of chicken, too.

I've come to loathe supermarkets with an intensity I used to reserve for politicians. I detest their bland wooden carrots, unseasonal soft fruit and overpriced organics airfreighted in from Third World countries. I hate the way supermarkets and salmon farmers conspired to create a whole new fish, suppurating with vile white fluid and fat, virtually killing off proper wild salmon in the process.

The ready meals they sell by the truckload are laden with salt, sugar and fat. Why would anyone prepare a meal when there's a choice of 20 "gourmet" pizzas in the chill cabinet? It's ironic, but supermarkets are killing cooking. In the baking aisle the other day it was easier to find ready-made "frosting" than plain old icing sugar.

And don't even start me on the packaging. Vast amounts of our domestic rubbish is cardboard food boxes, plastic trays, Cellophane wrapping. Last week a report showed supermarkets are much worse offenders than small shops, with only 40 per cent of Marks & Spencer packaging being recyclable, compared with 79 per cent of that from local retailers.

The Competition Commission does make one demand for action against supermarkets. It urges that planning loopholes used by supermarkets to keep out rivals by buying up swathes of land should be closed. Which is basically a green light to open yet more megastores.

If that happens, then the future will belong to the supermarkets and no one else. More packaging, poorer farmers, fatter consumers - and an even more forlorn search for a real butcher.