Woody Allen was once asked if sex is dirty. Only, he replied, if it's being done right. A similar notion could once be applied to edible treats. Is a treat always expensive? Why yes, the old theory goes, but only if it's being done right. A treat is slippery jewels of caviar eaten off the ball of a friend's hand. It is a well-marbled, long-aged steak from some pampered animal. It is a cascade of fruits de mer, all shy grinning shell and beady eye. It is ceps seared in butter. It is shaved white truffles. It is the freshest of rust-coloured sea urchins, smelling brightly of the shore.

Or at least, in warmer times it might have been. For cold economic winds will continue to blow in 2013 and treating ourselves with smears of caviar and heaps of truffles is trickier than once it was. Few of us can just throw money at the issue. So now we have to look elsewhere for our pleasures. We have to be canny about them.

But we also have to be shameless, which these days takes some doing. We have heard much, including from me, about the pimped dirty food trend; of burgers and hot dogs given the luxe treatment. Some people are so bored by it they're even bored with people telling them how boring it is.

What's less talked about is the way the elevation of the humble has infected other parts of our bad food larder. Being a food slut is so much tougher these days. Scotch eggs used to be bright orange and hockey puck-hard. They were a reliable symbol of late-night desperation.

Now Fortnum & Mason will flog you a goose Scotch egg for more than a tenner. Pork scratchings used to be a guaranteed place for badness. If it didn't have bristles, it wasn't a proper scratching. Now they come bristle-free in fancy bags that are nowhere near shiny enough, and are marketed within an inch of their lives. And don't even get me started on what's happened to chocolate. Today even admitting you once ate a few squares of Cadbury's Dairy Milk will get you a baleful stare, and a lecture on how "it's not really chocolate because it's full of vegetable oil".

Well bog off. No really. Do. I love my chocolate full of vegetable oil. Sometimes. Not all the time. But sometimes. And if we are looking for treats in an age when credit ratings companies are downgrading Britain's debt downwards towards junk status, then a little bit of cheap edible junk may just be what we want.

I don't need my cheese and onion crisps made with West Country PDO cheddar and confited shallots. Pork scratchings are meant to be fatty and salty, not dainty and elegant. Do not go sacrificing rare breed pigs for something as gutter-born as a sausage roll.

And yes, sometimes I'll eat square after square of that vegetable oil-heavy Dairy Milk rather than the so-called classy stuff, because when you are comforting yourself with cheap treats you need to be able to eat enough of it. Fancy chocolate is both too expensive and too rich for that sort of behaviour. It just doesn't do the job. And that's the point. A treat is just that. A rare experience; a splash of colour amid the monochrome. How you get that hit – and how much you pay for it – is entirely up to you.