As the foot and mouth crisis fades from the front pages, we are turning our media-led attention to other 21st century blues the crumbling railway infra structure, our fracturing national health service and a demotivated education system.

The images, that dominated our screens, of the charred corpses of farm animals with their legs forlornly sticking up into the air will begin to fade as we enjoy the freedom to rove the countryside again.

We had a brief glimpse of the way that our food is produced. We learned of the cruel absurdity of the transportation of live animals vast distances to be slaughtered or sold.

The closure of hundreds of local abattoirs has been partly responsible for these tumbrels crammed with poor creatures being transported vast distances; but also responsible is mass buying by supermarkets who dictate where and when animals should be slaughtered.

The virulence of the foot and mouth outbreak is a direct result of this cross contamination.

And who is to blame? We are. We expect and demand ever cheaper food. We are bombarded by TV programmes that suggest we have the most refined of taste but we spend less per head on our food than any other European nation. And the proportion of fresh food we buy drops every year.

Farming is no different from any other commercial operation. Farmers, whatever size their farm, need to make a profit. It would be ludicrous to expect the producers of our food to improve farming practices and animal husbandry unilaterally, when the supermarket giants won't pay the extra cost of more environmentally friendly practices that might actually produce better food.

And they won't pay because we demand ever-cheaper food.

Until we lose our addiction to cheap food come what may, we will continue to succumb to outbreaks of pestilence of biblical proportions.

We will continue to decimate our once thriving and self-supporting farming industry and turn the countryside into a factory.

The farmers can't do it alone and the supermarkets and MAFFs, NAFFs or whatever department is cobbled together in the future, won't do it unless they are responding to a strong message from us that we want better food, not cheaper food and that we are prepared to pay the cost.

Popular pressure is the way to bring about change. While we demand cheap food, we'll get it.