2009-01-27 - 1:53 a.m.

We are in the midst of a recession. Our credit has crunched. The chips are down and our goose is cooked. Woolworths is a vacant husk, ghostly notes from former workers pasted forlornly in the window. Well, thank goodness for that – Woolworths was shit. It sold nothing that wasn’t cheaper or better elsewhere and was 5 minutes’ further walk from my home than Asda, so excuse my absence of wailing and teeth gnashing. Those of a masochistic bent who can watch the BBC for longer than half an hour will soon be accosted by a soothsayer proclaiming the apocalypse in the form of factory closures and bank bailouts, facilitated by a spineless government. This is the collapse of western civilisation, the death of value. That tinnitus that gnaws at your eardrum is, in fact, the death rattle of the capitalist gravy train, greased with the snake oil of the financial mountebanks. The masters of the universe are yesterday’s plaything. Oh, how we cry, oh how we tremble.

We turn in such doom-laden times to cheaper food. We traipse mournfully past the prophetic statues of Lenin and Loman to Aldi. This, at least, was the premise of Channel 4’s latest diatribe against supermarkets – The True Cost of Cheap Food. Presented by fearless restaurant critic Jay Rayner, this programme sought to expose the horrors lurking in our smartprice chickens: water, mostly. We should all now ‘think twice’ about what we place in our shopping basket. Are we really getting a bargain, hmmm? It was all thoroughly scientific, of course. There was a lab and everything. Heston Blumenthal popped up with his syringe. Tomatoes were analysed. The cheaper tomatoes were, shockingly, found to contain fewer micrograms of something or other than their costlier cousins. It’s a wonder the human race has lasted this long. Well, no longer can those unscrupulous supermarkets pull the wool over our eyes like so many battery-farmed sheep! The consumer has been vine-ripened to wisdom! No longer shall we be seduced by those cheap, naked breasts inflated with skullduggery. Instead we shall flock to our local butcher to buy more expensive meat and thereby renourish our spendthrift souls. Hey, it’ll do wonders for the economy. Stupid.

I sensed something was afoot when a family, foolishly squandering their money on cheap supermarket food, was used to illustrate this recession that necessitates such reckless consumerism. In these cruel and unforgiving times this polite nuclear family were stuggling through their lives, hopelessly unaware of the evil lurking in their budget scran. The sqaulor they lived in was heartbreaking. There was only one trampoline in the back garden of their suburban semi. The man had recently had to downsize his business. They were then shown feeding the ducks at a park. The viewer can only presume that before the recession held sway over all this family spent their Sunday afternoons more glamourously, lighting cigars with £50 notes from the comfort of their jacuzzi while muttering darkly about the degenerate lower orders. But wait a minute! There’s something wrong here... We are told there is a recession and yet here’s this family, this living family, standing defiantly in their finery, throwing bread away as if they were kings. So that’s why the commies in Russia's ruins used to queue up so patiently for the stuff! Who could possibly care about starvation and unemployment when there’s ducks to feed? Ducks! In a recession! Give a man a fishing rod and he will put it in the loft and forget about it. Give a man a net, however, and he will dine on duck nightly. Poundland is doing a thriving trade in nets these days. It’s the recession. Duck!

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