What's been the point of Food Standards Agency?
What's this sound of galloping I can hear outside my window?
Another horse on its way to a new life between two halves of a bun?
No, it's the Food Standards Agency trying to get ahead of the game.
If it does it will be the first time in its relatively short and very undistinguished history that it has managed it.
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Judging by its performance in recent months the FSA has now confirmed what a lot of us thought when Labour set it up – that it was just another fancily titled nonentity where the usual Labour cronies and all-purpose quango-hoppers could be comfortably remunerated in return for not very much by way of expended effort.
If you can cast your mind back far enough to the duo who were initially put in charge – Sir John Krebs and Dame Suzi Leather – all sorts of wild promises were being flung around.
Britain's food would become safer, more wholesome, more traceable. The national diet would improve as a result. An unbendingly rigid line would be taken with anyone caught trying to break the rules.
None of which, of course, has happened.
In fact until the horsemeat scandal erupted the FSA had all but disappeared from view, its employees engaged in little more than paper-shuffling to occupy the hours between nine and four-thirty.
Had the FSA not been asleep on the bridge for quite so long it might have mustered the enthusiasm to order the odd spot-check on the cheaper end of the convenience food market.
It might, like a lot of us have been doing, have wondered, when prices were so low yet were still theoretically delivering profits, what was going on; precisely what was being used by way of ingredients to allow, for example, eight burgers to be sold for a pound.
Sadly, none of this happened. It has fallen instead to some of our many celebrity chefs to try to wake the nation up to the fact that it's been feeding its children Class A junk food – not, I suspect, that many have bothered to listen.
Contrast this with the way inspectors have been crawling all over British farms, threatening penalties for the least infringement of the most petty of regulations, putting farmers under huge stress and adding greatly to the problems they always face with the weather and soaring energy costs.
The fact is, British farmers have been providing the food chain with raw materials of a quality you will find it very hard to match anywhere else in the world.
It's what happened to them after they have been sold that has caused the latest scandal.
And here's another one in the making.
Is anyone checking the huge tonnage of pork imports – many, let's forget, from EU Member States which have not yet implemented the stall-and-tether ban – which reportedly contain dangerously high levels of antibiotic residues which would certainly not be tolerated in British meat?
Perhaps the FSA might like to take an interest in that area.
If it isn't too busy. If it has nothing else on.
The FSA's only achievement has been to preside over a steady deterioration in the quality of our food. Perhaps it should be renamed the Lower Food Standards Agency.
Then we wouldn't have so much to complain about.
Derek Mead is an entrepreneur dairy farmer from Weston-super-Mare
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