A £1m campaign to promote quality food has been scrapped after the government refused to support it, claiming a picture of Jersey cows in rolling green fields was “too British” and thus broke European regulations.

One photograph, headlined One Day with Daisy, was deemed to be too obviously of a British landscape and thus risked breaching articles 20 and 28 of the Treaty of Rome, designed to curb illegal state subsidies.

The European Union, however, has distanced itself from the move, saying the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), was “wrong”.

Critics have attacked government officials for taking their desire to abide by EU rules to absurd extremes.

Food industry leaders said the verdict, reached after 15 months of negotiations, was a significant setback to efforts to create food brands with a defined provenance in Britain to challenge French and Italian rivals.

George Dunn, chief executive of the Tenant Farmers Association, said: “There is a groundswell of opinion, demonstrated by the success of the programme Jamie’s School Dinners, that something has to change in the health and quality of our food.

“This marketing campaign, in the shape of a glossy magazine, was a small but significant step. The way Defra has interpreted the rules was overzealous and we believe there would have been a more favourable treatment in Paris, Rome or Athens.”

In a letter dated March 2, Jeremy Cowper, a senior Defra official, rejected an application for a £300,000 grant under the Rural Enterprise Scheme after assessing a dummy version of the proposed magazine.

Cowper, head of Defra’s food chain marketing and competitiveness division, warned that “many of the proposed articles would breach article 28 of the treaty because of their focus on the British origin of the product”.

He added that even if the articles were changed, it would be possible to breach article 20 through the overall impression given by the magazine. “A (place of) origin focus could be created by, for example, using lots of pictures of an obviously British landscape,” he wrote.

He was particularly scathing about the cover story, One Day with Daisy, which followed three office-based executives as they tried their hand at farming for a day.

All but one of the pictures showed farming scenes that could have represented anywhere in the northern half of the EU. But Cowper took exception to a shot of a small herd of Jersey cows milling round a middle-aged farmer on a sunny spring day.

He wrote: “Lots of pictures of an obviously British landscape would add to the overall focus on origin and could tip the balance (against state funding).”

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