I wandered up a hill through an ancient orchard: apples, cherries, peaches in superabundant cascade, a vine-clad pergola bursting with grapes. Ah, the bounty and beauty of nature! Nectarine trees splashed all over with fragrant fruit of such a brilliant red it was almost unrealistic. At the top of the hill behind the stage area in the shade of a six-storey fig tree, Blur's entire road crew and the French stage crew were sitting down to a gargantuan feast. We'll skip the details, which were endless - suffice to say even the Coca-Cola was nicer than normal because it was in bottles rather than in cans. What a nice place to be it was, nicer than the nicest of restaurants, somehow - maybe because it felt more like a home than a business. Backing singers exchanged thoughts with local riggers, truck drivers and promoters' reps taking a long time over their short coffees, telling stories, smiling, pausing for a moment before they dashed off to the next place - and I felt I could have stayed there forever.

But that was France. I wish I could tell you it was as nice as that at Glastonbury, but backstage catering there - at all our flagship music festivals, in fact - tends to be a squalid affair that shouts "keep out" rather than "come in". It's not the poor, downtrodden, hardworking caterers' fault either. It's the organisers'. Food is an afterthought. Despite being less than a mile from the country's best goat's cheese producer, and in the heart of the terroir of the best cheese in the world - cheddar - there was no nice cheese to be had in the dressing rooms at Glastonbury. You can't call it a party if the food's not half-decent, and the irony with Glastonbury, where the food is particularly bad, is that it takes place on a farm. And farms are where food comes from, right, kids?

Since this magazine began, truly amazing things have happened. We have reclaimed our national cuisine. If we are allowed to choose and choose carefully, we can now eat as well as anyone, anywhere in the world. The United Kingdom is the home of the world's most glamorous restaurants. Chefs are our biggest international celebrities, more famous than our rock stars. We have more types of cheese than they do in France, and we have so much more to choose from. Chipping Norton, my nearest town - population 6,000 - has two Indian restaurants, three Chinese, and one Thai, a trattoria, a kebab man, plus half a dozen local modern-traditional type places. Some are great and, more significantly, none is dreadful. It's not just restaurants, either. The shops have got better. There is a farmers' market in the square and in the environs there are microbreweries, cheesemakers, game dealers, farm shops, fisheries and foragers.

So much to choose from, but all our institutional food still tends to be diabolical - it's not just Glastonbury. We have the best roads in Europe and they are free for everyone, but I don't know anyone, including my children, who couldn't make themselves a nicer sandwich than those cold, floppy triangles in Moto-wotsits. In the Colombian jungle, where there has been civil war raging for decades and they haven't got round to building any roads yet, the food is nice. The coffee is sublime. Why, I wonder, is it not possible to put fresh milk on a train? Us, the world's greatest tea drinkers, drinking bag-in nonsense with those ster-youpid little pots of long-life milk. The only thing to do is complain.

I thought we were supposed to be good at that?