Fancy a pork chop fattened on the beaks and gizzards of dead chickens? Or a chicken fed on scraps of pig too unappetising even to find their way into a meat pie? No, I thought not.

Posing the question in that way invites its own answer, but I am not sure there is a nicer way of putting it. It beggars belief that barely 20 years after the emergence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and a decade after it transmitted itself to humans as variant CJD, we should again be talking of feeding animals to animals.

There are, of course, some important differences. Pigs are omnivores and have always been the ultimate disposal machine for waste food. And chickens have such a brief life that the prospect they could incubate a CJD-like disease is small.

In the past, both species have been exposed to far more contaminated meat and bone meal than cattle ever were. Pigs can get BSE if they are injected many times with homogenised brain from infected cows, but not, experiments suggest, from eating it. There is no evidence that chickens can be infected by either route.

So it is certainly possible to argue that the proposal would be safe, assuming no cross-contamination of the feedstuffs with waste material from sheep or cattle. What I doubt is whether consumers are ready to listen to such an argument.

Food is a point at which science and emotion intersect. Without scientific advances in production and preservation, it would be impossible to feed so many so well. Modern food is as much a product of the laboratory as it is of the farm and field.

But it is far more than that. Sitting down to a meal is a celebration, an opportunity for companionship and shared pleasure – in Eurospeak, we might call it an instrument of social cohesion.

People have gut instincts about food, which is hardly surprising as that is exactly where it is heading. It is a subject where rational argument can take you only so far before it is swamped by more atavistic instincts: harvest home, a full larder, a satisfied family.

So food producers and retailers must meet two conflicting demands: the need to produce food in unrealistic quantities at unreasonably low prices, while pretending it is as wholesome and “natural” as ever. This is a tricky task, made doubly difficult by the memory of BSE and the false assurances doled out by politicians that it could not be transmitted to people through beef. Britain was probably unlucky to be the place where this ghastly experiment played out – it could as well have happened in a number of other countries – but it has sensitised consumers here to a higher degree than elsewhere.

So while it might be safe to feed chicken waste to pigs, and vice versa, it would not be sensible to try. The demons it would set in motion would far outrun any benefits that farmers might accrue from the cheaper disposal of carcasses and a convenient source of high-protein feed. It is an idea better buried.