On British Airways flights this summer, in what the smug set through the forward blue curtain refer to dysphemistically as goat class, travellers may quite literally be left asking: where's the beef? It was announced this week that BA is dispensing with the service of beef dishes in its economy-class cabins, in preference for fish pie or chicken and tarragon. Cost does not enter into it, BA claimed. The new meals are healthier. Lighter, too; and without religious prohibitions for all passengers.

Now one might imagine that BA would wish to look after its top-end customers as well, the ones paying the big bucks for leg room and the chance to eat olives in the lounge at 6.15 in the morning. But, no. In business and first class, passengers will still be served beef, implying that BA wishes them to be unhealthy, bloated and trapped next to a ticked-off Hindu for several hours.

Either that, or the whole thing is a scam, a rip-off, a way of cutting costs while pretending to be doing the client a favour because, let's face it, fish and pie, like chicken and tarragon, only go together when bonded by cream, meaning neither is as healthy as, say, a bit more space between seats so the guy in the middle doesn't go down with deep-vein thrombosis. Or some air not expelled from the mouth of Hades. And, as any Jew, Muslim, Hindu or vegetarian knows, meals that conform to religious belief or personal choice can be ordered in advance. That is why bacon sandwiches are handed out on early-morning shuttle flights without causing a riot.

So something is fishy and it is not just the pie. No, what we have here is space-saver wheel syndrome, or another example of the way the consumer is hoodwinked under the guise of efficiency, health, safety, security or conservation, while the reality of big business is always bottom line, bottom line, bottom line. British Airways may dissemble, but beef being available to those who wish to pay means that better living and religious sensitivity do not enter into it. Beef prices have risen from £2,500 per tonne to £4,000 per tonne in the past three months. If BA was upfront with its public, the announcement would read: if you can't afford it at home, you ain't getting it on us. At least then you would know where you stood.

Space-saver wheel syndrome started in that bastion of fair practice, the car industry, where the advent of the term “optional extra” afforded people the privilege of paying for something that had previously been treated as standard, like a radio or upholstery that did not look as if it had been stolen from the Bakerloo Line in 1963.

Then someone came up with the idea of a space-saver wheel and the penny-pinching racket really took off. The space saver replaced the old spare tyre buried in your boot, because that was just taking up room. Screw being safe and roadworthy, you thought, how can I claw back a few inches in a part of my vehicle that will never see daylight from one year to the next unless I am a drug dealer or engaged in the smuggling of tobacco products? Space savers could be fitted in place of a punctured tyre but did not have the same specification and could only be driven temporarily, and then at 50mph maximum. If you had a long motorway drive, they were hopeless.

They may have saved the company money, but to the driver they became the thin end of the wedge. Worse followed. No spare wheel, no spare tyre. These days, many cars contain a puncture repair kit, one step up from that used on old bicycles. You seal the hole with glue and re-inflate. If you have a repairable tyre, that is. If not, you are stuffed. For your own good, of course. Nothing to do with money. Nothing at all.

The bloke that towed me to Kwik Fit in Watford, once the RAC had established that my puncture was the sort that a glorified Band-Aid could not fix, really had bought the ticket. As I cursed and ranted about what a rip-off it was that cars no longer had spare wheels, how dangerous this was, how I could have been stranded had this been a country lane at midnight, not 9.30 Sunday morning on the M25, he explained, quite chattily, that a lot of cars did not have them now and he was always towing people off motorways for a simple puncture.

“It is all about performance,” he said. “You get better performance if the car is lighter.” Four words to describe my car. Big. Volvo. Diesel. Automatic. I could not be less interested in performance if I was driving a tank. Jeremy Clarkson would spit at me in the street. I no longer want to see what this baby has under the hood. I have no desire to open her up on the straight through Epping Forest. I have made my choice and it is to live out my driving years like a member of the Soviet Politburo. Better yet, like Mr Magoo. If I plough this bastard into a ditch, I'm walking away without a scratch. Now if I was being towed in a Maserati GranTurismo with a guy telling me it was fair trade for the exquisite joy of motoring, I might concur. But I am driving the equivalent of an armoured milk float and I'm up on a trailer, too. So I'm feeling gypped.

And, of course, it is dangerous. If you have a bald spare tyre you fail your MoT, but you can have no spare tyre at all and that is fine. It took two vehicles to get me off the motorway, when it might not have needed one. This could have left a family with small children stranded, or marooned a vulnerable person late at night. By law we should all have a fully operational spare wheel, not a space saver or a tube of glue. Volvo is not being straight, but neither is BA.

Nobody is on a plane for the food, but consumers at least deserve honesty. You might not know a boeuf béarnaise from a coulibiac, but you'll care soon enough if the pilot tries to land your holiday jet on space-saver wheels. For your own good, naturally. Nothing to do with money. Nothing at all.

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