In the end this man, with his happy, smiley but curiously soulless voice, left me in no doubt about one thing – what they all want is total domination of the British retail sector. And they want it not for the benefit of local communities or for their staff, not for their suppliers, nor even for their loyal customers: they want it for their balance sheets, and their shareholders, and themselves.

In the end this man, with his happy, smiley but curiously soulless voice, left me in no doubt about one thing – what they all want is total domination of the British retail sector

All this, of course, is a massive threat to local food communities, by which I mean small town high streets, local markets and farm shops. And I know this from personal experience. Even in the relatively affluent West Country where I live, the market towns and high streets are not what they were before the big fat supermarkets – one, two, sometimes three of them – came and sat on the edge of town and sucked the lifeblood out. In fact, they’re often a shadow of their former selves.

How can local businesses, independent grocers and small artisan food stores survive this onslaught of land acquisition and intensive grasping for market share? Often they can’t, and the increasing prevalence of what have been dubbed ghost towns, or clone towns, is proof of that.

What scares me the most, however, is not that supermarkets are ignoring the issue of sourcing local food – it’s that they’re finally acknowledging it. And it scares me because they are beginning to tell us that we needn’t worry about local markets, looking after small producers and reducing food miles, because they will do it all for us. They’ll dress up a little corner of their store to look like a French market stall and pull in a few local cheeses and a couple of cauliflowers. There you go, they’ll say, there’s your local food.

This is not a commitment to local food. It is cynical window-dressing. In fact, it’s worse than window-dressing: it’s deceit, a bare-faced lie about what their business is really up to. It’s like a crack dealer deciding that it would be good for public relations if he sold fudge, or flowers, as well as drugs. He’ll happily sell you the flowers, he might even give them away, because he knows he’ll get you further down the aisle with his main line of business: selling drugs. Buy one gram, get one free. And a free assemble-it-yourself crack pipe with every £100 you spend.

What we are witnessing is an ugly, brutish fight to win the lion’s share of a massive global business selling something that we all need, every single day: food. We are innocent bystanders, caught in the cross-fire, and we are finding it very difficult to influence the outcome.