I was in Glaisdale the other day (you don't know? On the north York Moors of course, inland a bit from Whitby. Look at a map), a beautiful day not a cloud in the sky and the moors ranging as far as the eyes could decipher like a calm sea. The reason for being in Glaisdale was part of this filming jaunt I am up to my jaws in for Channel 4 which has so far eaten up much of this year. We visited Robert Ford, the butcher. This is a family firm, from grandfather to father and now to sons, just a little terraced house really, with a shed out the back. But the best. The very best that British meat has to offer. Most of the beef and lamb comes from their own farm, reared specifically for the quality of the meat rather than for the profit from the sale of the live animal. Local pigs supply all the ham and bacon. The Fords salt their own ham , make their own sausages and 17 different kinds of pie, including the most delicious pork pie I have ever tasted. It was so good that I had to taste four more of them just to make sure. I was shown the whole pie-making process, from start to finish, and saw that only the freshest ingredients were used, really good short pastry, fresh pork ('that pie were pig two days ago') fresh herbs and good gravy.

How much of this, I asked, is organic? None. From the pastry to the pig, everything was produced inorganically. Not battery farming by any stretch of the imagination, but no attempt to get organic creditation. Did it taste any worse for this? No. The sensuous experience could not be coloured by morality. But there is a moral middle ground and clearly everything in this Glaisdale butcher's shop falls directly into it. The locally produced food is cared for in every detail with skill and affection and better than almost anything you can get in the world. Why can't pubs do this? Why are they allowed to sell factory-produced rubbish under the guise of 'home-cooking'?

The moral of the story isn't to get any skewwhiff highfalutin idea of what organic eating means. I have eaten very dull organic food, badly prepared from mediocre ingredients. The best food is always fresh, in season, sourced locally and prepared simply with great care, organic or not. The reason that I try very hard to eat organic food wherever possible and resolutely grow organic food at home is as much for health reasons as for the taste or moral superiority of it all.

Mind you, it can get even more morally complicated. The other day my wife Sarah bought a huge piece of organic Parmesan from Safeway. It cost roughly £18 a kilo. The organic Parmesan in the organic shop down the road was about £5 a kilo more. That is a lot. We could afford it but I guess that anyone, however well-heeled would think twice and feel ripped off. But, to what extent are Safeway and other supermarkets deliberately undercutting local stores to capture the growing organic market?

For a long while a large section of the organic movement had a blanket condemnation of supermarkets. This is like railing against the weather. They ain't going to go away and I am sure that they could harness their huge buying power to make good organic food available to as many people as possible. One of the main problems of supermarket organic food is that most of it comes to their shelves via thousands of food miles so you are contributing heavily to pollution and global warming. So one of the main reasons for using a small local shop is to eat locally produced food.

At home here, the vegetable garden is now a fast-food market place and we can go out and browse the stalls before each meal. The time it takes to choose your lettuce, carrots, asparagus or spinach, gather them, wash and prepare them for the plate is certainly just as quick as ordering and queuing for takeaway 'food'. The one vegetable above all that should be harvested minutes before eating is asparagus. Freshness is all. I made new asparagus beds two years ago and this year they are coming into their own. I have planted Connover's Colossal, a Victorian variety with fat spears.

The truth is that freshness is far more influential than variety in terms of taste. You put a large pan of water on the stove and when it is boiling you go into the garden and cut the spears just below the surface of the soil, put them in a basket, rinse them under a tap and then into the boiling water. Five minutes is enough. Eat with melted butter. Eat a lot. I don't touch asparagus at any other time because to me it would be like deciding that I like Christmas so would have it every week.

While being an organic shopper or consumer can be a complicated business, there is one great organic gardening truth: when in doubt do nothing. Plants - unlike animals - have a habit of getting on fine without human interference. I got an email the other day in response to a comment in my Life gardening column that my gooseberries were being devoured by sawfly and gave a brief account of the various organic lengths that I go to prevent this. My correspondent told me not to be so daft. She never had any trouble from sawfly. Her grandmother used to chuck a bucket of wood ashes over the bushes as she passed(must have made the berries a bit gritty) and never saw a sawfly in her life. I was being too kind on the bushes. I suspect that she is right. All gardeners have the tendency to see their efforts as a battle against nature instead of an easy co-existence.

But it can feel like a war if you have been watching a crop like gooseberries grow and ripen, swelling into pickable perfection and then find that a bird, insect or disease has got to them first. You feel robbed. After all, there is only one crop of gooseberries to be had. And I do love a gooseberry. Gooseberry fool, gooseberry tart (with a sprinkling of sugar and some single cream poured over it) are both heavenly. I have a friend that makes the most wonderful gooseberry ice-cream, using fresh berries and Greek yoghurt. On the whole I don't like ice cream but I love this. I suppose that the connection - other than this early summer season - between asparagus and gooseberries is that they both taste so completely of themselves. You cannot fake it, you cannot package it. Eat the real, fresh organic thing and it is never forgotten. You have to grow it yourself or come to my house. And you're too late - we have eaten them all.