The record industry is a sinking battleship. It's going down, down, down. Top of the Pops has long been cancelled and now, I'm told, EMI has just been sold. This is the record company that owns the Beatles' catalogue. If it's true that they've had to sell the crown jewels for scrap it's because the current record-company business model doesn't fit the way the world works any more. Blur's greatest hits, the family silver, is being repackaged as a sort of boxed-set-booklet-DVD-triple-whammy-doo-dah for Christmas. It needs the added extras because people aren't buying CDs as presents any more. Giving a friend a CD for Christmas is now something like giving them a packet of crisps or a Mars bar. It's not quite enough. And the business end of things in the music world is a sunny afternoon compared to the dark tragedies of nightmare that are playing out on the artist's side of the fence. The music industry's two biggest headline gobblers, Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse, are living in worlds of pain and wearing their celebrity like chains. I'll be pleasantly surprised if they both live to see out the decade, let alone make a record everybody likes.

I only mention this because I make records and because I've also just started making cheese. The prevailing moods in these two great spheres of human endeavour could not be further apart: after the grim requiem of the record it's a blessed relief to hear the fanfare of fine fare. In showbusiness the fat lady is singing and no one is even listening, but for the gastronomes the party is just getting started and the crowd is baying for more, more, more. Things just couldn't be more tickety-boo and upbeat in the kitchen. There is a palpable sense of buoyancy and excitement. It is apparently impossible to make food that is too expensive and the people who are doing it are enjoying themselves more than Duran Duran did in the good old days of rock'n'roll. In previous decades we have exported our music all around the world and now we are developing a food culture to rival our musical heritage. Our chefs are now more famous and entertaining than our rock stars.

We've rapidly become gourmandised as a nation. It's like we were listening to everything on crackly old 78s and someone has suddenly invented stereo. Rock'n'roll is 50 years old, and there is nothing truly exciting left to do with it apart from set it on fire and watch it burn. There is nowhere to go with the three- and-a-half minute pop song, except for rehab. Food, on the other hand, is a vast unexplored glory that we all have access to.

I met a buyer for a large American supermarket chain at the Great British Cheese Awards. Large in the way that only Americans can be large. He said that it's absoloodely incredible what's happening here. In his expert opinion we are making better cheese than the French at the moment and we have more varieties, too. He suggested he would be able to shift Little Wallop, my debut cheese, by the million. Now that's rock'n'roll. Especially as no one in America has heard of Blur. Unfortunately, I can only make about 500 Little Wallops a week, but it's encouraging.

I thought music was a universal language, but it is actually a tribal one, always an exclusive dialect. Food, particularly cheese I've discovered to my great delight, is the most basic and shareable human pleasure. It truly unites everybody from the young to the old, any culture, any creed. Food is the music of love.