THERE WAS A photograph in the Sunday newspapers, a standard pap snap, of Colleen McLoughlin, Wayne Rooney’s girlfriend, out shopping. No change there, you might think. Over the past few years Colleen has enjoyed a romance with retail that makes Michael Jackson look frugal. One trip to New York ended in a two-hour interview at Manchester Airport, after customs officials correctly suspected she had exceeded the £145 plus 200 fags limit on imported goods. Some estimated that she had exceeded it by as much as £39,855.

So “Colleen shops” is hardly big news. The story was her choice of store. Kwik Save, Liverpool. No clue to what she was buying, but it was unlikely to be the work of hot designers V & R or the latest Franck Muller timepiece. So a wild guess would suggest that Colleen was on the lookout for cheap food, bringing her neatly into line with the rest of modern Britain. A nation dribbling mass-produced ready meals down its designer tops. A population of bleeding hearts that want animals to be treated ethically but would rather eat a tin of condemned veal than put 2p per pound on a packet of chicken drumsticks. Have you seen the price of free-range meat? Get back in the cage the lot of you.

Last week little Britain had a collective seizure because Jamie Oliver slaughtered a lamb on television. He was staying with a family of hunters in the Le Marche region of Italy and was required to kill the animal that would be roasted for dinner. Oliver was plainly uncomfortable at the thought and distressed by the act, but appeared sincere in his belief that this was a vital constituent of human existence and he would be a fraud, as a person who is defined by his passion for food, if he did not participate.

In the end, the family patriarch guided his hand to the lamb’s throat and helped push the knife in. Oliver closed his eyes and looked the other way. Left to his own devices, he would not have been able to pull it off. There was nothing gratuitous or falsely macho in the scene. It was death as a part of life. The weirdness was in the public reaction.

Modern society prefers to keep its reality television unreal. It wants to watch people that the majority of its citizens will never meet. Waspish transvestites, white witches, nude models, people called Science and Janet Street-Porter. Then someone eats dinner and everybody has conniptions. David Beckham’s former mistress pulling off a pig or Diana’s butler with a mouthful of kangaroo knackers is, apparently, real. A cook killing a lamb, however, is an abomination. Had Oliver dressed the animal in Burberry, popped it in his handbag and swept it off in a limo to be made over Paris Hilton-style, we might have taken him to our hearts. As he decided to roast it on a spit with a bit of rosemary, he is one fish-gutting scene from a full-scale burning of his books. Is there no limit to our perversity?

The main objection was that Oliver was cruel not to stun the animal. Perhaps he should have shown it the bill for the average celebrity shopping trip to New York. Maybe that is what they do on the way to Kwik Save these days. Hold up a picture of Colleen’s latest outfit to a lorryload of sheep. “How much do you think she paid for these boots?” Huh? Bang. “That’s another 50 gone, Harry. Bung ’em in the skip.”

Yet the ethical treatment of animals is just so much chatter when Britain stubbornly resists paying a fair rate for its food. Chicken is cheaper today than it was 20 years ago. Fact. Now that has not been achieved by increased free-range or labour intensive organic farming. Putting fowl together in wire cages, with a legal space requirement per chicken that equates to three-quarters of a sheet of A4 paper, does it. There are between 23 and 30 million chickens in Britain, 85 per cent are battery farmed, and two million die each year through inadequate cleaning of faeces. Now you can have crap-choked, cheaper chicken or you can have ethical, open-air, expensive chicken; but you can’t have cheap ethical chicken.

Organic food is on the march, according to the Soil Association, but appearances can be deceptive. Much organic produce sold in supermarkets is now imported to meet public demand for economy. Yes, you can’t grow bananas in Britain, but there is no reason why more than 70 per cent of organic onions should come from abroad, other than cost cutting. Tesco imports 50 per cent of its organic pork, Asda 23 per cent. Across all products, almost half the organic food sold in Britain is foreign, a large percentage of which makes for cheap labour, cheap overheads and posh food at Kwik Save prices. Now, surprise, surprise, organic food is beginning to sell — but the Soil Association claims it comes from countries with poor animal welfare standards. And back to square one.

A familiar complaint is that the poor and elderly will be priced out of the market by raised standards. But being potless, or 70, is not a modern invention. People have always been poor; people have always grown old. That is why most great working-class feasts involve taking a cut of low-quality meat and cooking it for a length of time to make it tender; or it did before cooking became a spectator sport — something the British watch Gordon Ramsay do while they eat a frozen pizza and wait for Rebecca Loos to show a Gloucester Old Spot a good time.

The future Mrs Rooney may only have stopped for some cheap booze and a Toilet Duck. But no footballer’s wife would be seen dead leaving H Samuel or British Home Stores. If Viktor & Rolf really want to crack the British market, maybe they should throw in a packet of fish fingers with the next collection.