I was eight when I went abroad for the first time: a trip to France in my mother’s black Datsun Cherry. We drove from Sheffield to Calais, crossed the Channel in a hovercraft which made me throw up, and proceeded first to Amiens, where we stayed overnight in a tiny hotel close to the cathedral. The next day, our parents took us to a cafe for breakfast, where we ate croissants and drank thick hot chocolate from moss-green bowls, the first of what would turn out to be a series of head-turning moments. Oh, but it’s so hard to convey now just how exciting and delicious a plain croissant was then (this was the late 70s); I’d never eaten one before. Even as I finished it, licking my finger to gather every last flake, I worried that such an ambrosial delight might never pass my lips again. If this turned out to be so, I wasn’t sure life was going to be worth living.

There followed one revelation after another. Water that was – eh? – fizzy. Yogurts that were white rather than purple, and set rather than runny. Butter that was unsalted. Cheese that was stinky. Apricot jam that was so full of fruit you could barely spread it (the raspberry on which we’d been raised was thin and blandly saccharine). In a restaurant in the Loire, my brother and I tried snails, and even as we giggled and grimaced and generally made a fuss, I had a sense of the world opening up: all these things in it, for me to try and to like or dislike as I pleased (mostly, admittedly, for me to like). It was almost too much. Sitting in long grass by some roadside, eating one of my mum’s scratch picnics (camembert, baguette, greengages), we would fervently denounce Ski yogurts and Chivers jam. The superiority of French food – even the tinned peas; especially the tinned peas – had become, in the space of less than a week, an article of faith for us. We were miniature gastronomic zealots, crazed for Orangina, garlic and the pistachio milk chocolate you could buy in three packs at Carrefour and Intermarche.

You know where this is going. Brexit feels to me like grief, and, deep in mourning, I can’t stop thinking of the loved one, and all that she brought me. Of course, it’s possible to exaggerate the effect the EU has had on our eating habits. Things would have changed anyway, in the end; British supermarkets, for better or worse, sell sushi now. But it certainly speeded things up, with produce arriving first (today, 27% of the food eaten in the UK is imported from the EU, a figure that will really start to matter when, thanks to the falling pound, prices start to rise), then European cooks, sommeliers and waiters (it’s with good reason that 74% of members of the British Hospitality Association said, before the referendum, that they intended to vote to remain; vast numbers of those in British food service industries come from inside the EU). As a result, it’s difficult not to see this as a door closing – a refrigerator door, behind which there sits, in my dreams, an oozing brie de Meaux, a blushing hunk of culatello, and a small bowl of salty Nardin boquerones. How much more expensive are such treats likely soon to be? And what will happen to the smaller, passionately run companies which rely on importing them?

Two decades in, moreover, Europe finally achieved what once looked to be unachievable, sending us back to the best of our own produce. It took the EU’s PDO (protected designation of origin) schemes, and other similar initiatives established in the early 1990s, to remind many people of the unique qualities of such foods as Cumberland sausages, Wensleydale cheese and Yorkshire forced rhubarb – and that we should beware imposters. When the legislation is finally untangled, some years from now, will we hang on to these protections? Or will we, still in a blind rage at imaginary red tape, return to the bad old days when any supermarket or bakery chain could pass off its fatty, under-seasoned pork pies as having come from Melton Mowbray, its insipid factory-made blue cheese as being “genuine” Stilton? The celebrating Brexiteers are in a frenzy of nationalistic pride right now – and yet, somehow, it does not seem all that unlikely that their patriotism will fail to extend to this particular aspect of our culture. Do they think freedom lies in grey meat and flaccid pastry? Is it a case, for them, of better-the-cheap-British-cheese-you-know-than-the-dubious-foreign-stuff-you-don’t? It’s with low spirits that I write: I guess we are about to find out.