I live just north of Bordeaux. There’s a small town near here with a population of about 5,000 people that has a bigger market than London’s Borough market, plus five independent butchers and four independent bakeries.

The town also has an enormous supermarket. The supermarkets here are fascinating in that there is a strong degree of localisation. If one goes to the supermarket in that town, and then goes to the same brand of supermarket in a town 20 kilometres distant, you find completely different goods. I don’t mean toilet rolls and fly sprays, but perishable vegetables, meats, charcuterie, cheeses etc.

This means that the supermarkets are supporting their local economy; it also means that the food is fresh. There is a very apt saying in this regard: the French measure freshness in hours, the English measure it in weeks. This kind of support for local production is almost absent in Britain.

One of Britain’s problems is the Uniform Business Rate, a tax that is levied by central government nationwide, the effect of which is to jeopardise small businesses and allow the march of the supermarkets to go unimpeded.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In Spain, for example, there is positive discrimination in favour of small shops - big chains pay much higher business rates and the number of hours that supermarkets are allowed to open is restricted. None of this seems likely to apply to the UK, given the country’s mania for corporatism. There is a cross-party consensus in support of big business and, if ‘Call Me Dave’ Cameron gets elected, we can be absolutely sure that nothing is going to change.

There is a received idea that the Anglo-American way of doing things is on the march and that the French café and restaurant are in some kind of terminal decline. There is some truth in this, but not much. This idea derives partly from an unspoken Francophobia and partly from the fact that the coverage of food in Britain tends, for the most part, to concentrate on the atypical and chefs such as Heston Blumenthal and his hideously over-mediated Fat Duck and Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli. It’s rather like writing about music concentrating exclusively on Peter Maxwell-Davies and Harrison Birtwistle.

Besides, these ‘high end’, self proclaimingly innovative restaurants are a tiresome joke at the expense of a gullible public. I went to a restaurant of this kind in San Sebastián called Akelare, where the coup de grace was provided by the dessert. It was some kind of lactic thing, with a curd in a solid state and a sauce in a liquid state and you mixed the two together so that the curd became liquid and the sauce solid. It was like a third-form chemistry experiment. I did go to Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant shortly after it opened. It was indifferent, because he didn’t seem to have the technical ability to pull off the stuff he wanted to produce. And his pseudo-science is alarming.

French cooking is conservative. It’s not noticeably exciting, unless you seek out great excitement, but it seems to me to maintain a balance between what is sane and healthy and what is gastronomically attractive. The main thing is that the quality of produce used is simply much better than you find in Britain.

One difference is the effect of tradition, both in the production and the cooking of food. Another factor is the agricultural structure of the country, much of which is not susceptible to industrial agriculture because of the terrain. Industrial agriculture requires big, flat fields and because great chunks of France doesn’t have such things, you get smallholdings. In Britain, there are very few smallholdings and agri-industry is the norm; in France, it is the other way around.

Perversely, given the supposed benefits of large-scale production, food is considerably cheaper in France. The only thing I can think of that we pay more for than in Britain is lamb - and that’s simply because we do not live in a lamb-producing area. Virtually everything else is cheaper and it is of higher quality. The same situation probably applies in Spain, too.

That said, while French and Spanish food is better than British food generally, it would be wrong to slavishly copy the cuisines of these two countries. While Elizabeth David popularised Mediterranean cooking in the UK in the 1950s and 60s, her ultimate effect has actually been quite malign because she was encouraging the British to eat aubergines, peppers and other foods that won’t grow in the UK, and to adopt a kind of diet which was climatically unsuitable.

If one wants a model of how Britain should eat, it would be better to look at a country like Belgium, which has the same climate. Belgium is nutritionally self-sufficient and its culinary repertoire relies on a far smaller gamut of products. The norm in Britain now is that everybody wants food from Thailand, Sri Lanka, Central America and so on. The result is a tendency to overlook what is traditionally British. Britain borrows from other culinary cultures far more than almost any other country. It’s like deciding to invent a vocabulary in which you borrow some words from French, words from Danish, words from Greek in Greek script and throw them all together, to create a rather unhappy sort of métissage.

Another, related aspect of food that has really been brought home to me since coming to live in France is the way in which British food is still heavily class-based. While a lot of Britons probably eat better than their parents did, food is still very much divided in Britain by class and income. In most of continental Europe, the most important factor that determines what you eat is the area you live in; in Britain, it’s how much money you have.

The chief executive of a company in Bordeaux will eat pretty much the same repertoire of dishes as someone who works on the shop floor. It won’t be the same kind of thing that is typically eaten in another region of France. In Britain, building labourers across the country will eat the same kind of thing, which will be very different to what the company directors will be eating.

British people would eat better food, probably more cheaply, if they took the same attitude to what they eat as continental Europeans. Firstly, by revisiting traditional foods and focusing on produce that grows well locally. Secondly, by encouraging small-scale production, perhaps through taxation and planning laws, so that the big supermarkets cannot trample over every local producer.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Jonathan Meades is a commentator and novelist and former restaurant critic of The Times (London).