BURIED away in the news this week was a small, but significant, victory for those who enjoy traditional food. The Government has blocked plans to outlaw "green top" milk.

Perhaps mindful of the scorn and derision when beef on the bone was banned (a ban which seems certain to be lifted in the next few weeks), the Government has chosen to ignore the food police this time.

Green top milk, untreated and delicious, is a rare sight indeed these days - ask your milkman if you want to remember what real milk tastes like.

What would our ancestors have made of the modern day obsession with hygiene?

The sell by day on many goods is seen by some as an inflexible rule of nature. At midnight on the date stamped on the pack the goods immediately turn from edible to decaying and riddled with salmonella. How hardy Dales farmers, with their larders stocked with goods, would laugh.

Vegetables such as carrots come ready packaged in their peel but that doesn't stop our supermarkets putting them on polystyrene trays and shrink wrapping them in cellophane.

Of course basic standards of food hygiene are important but, like many modern trends, we seem swing from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the reckless to the excessively cautious.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.