If ever there was a scandal designed for the self-satisfied chatter of a British dinner party, it is that involving the discovery of horsemeat in cheap, ready-to-eat dishes labelled as beef. The arguments will be familiar: anybody buying cheap food gets what they deserve; too few people now know how to cook; we should all abandon the supermarkets in favour of our local independent shops.

And perhaps, in a perfect world, the middle-class rhetoric would apply. Of course consumers have a responsibility for what they feed themselves.

But this story is about something else. After all, consumers did take responsibility. They purchased products either made or sold by huge brand names such as Findus and Tesco, companies with decades on the high street that they had every right to trust. And in an age of genuine austerity, it ill behoves those who have enough cash to eat as they wish to stand in judgment on those who do not. Nobody shops in the value ranges out of choice.

Instead, we should focus on the mass retailers and the light-touch regulatory regime under which they operate. The declaration by environment secretary Owen Paterson, issued after yesterday's food industry summit, that those retailers had "ultimate responsibility" for what they sold suggests that regime is unlikely to be beefed up in the near future.

We should not dismiss the major super-markets as evil incarnate. Their convenience, economies of scale and huge range have done much to benefit British food culture. But the economic heft of these corporate behemoths is massively dangerous and made a scandal such as the current one all but inevitable.

When huge companies use their power in the market place to salami-slice profit margins, unscrupulous manufacturers are going to look for ways in which to make a buck. Throw in a global food market, which has seen beef prices peak at historic highs far beyond those for horse, and you have the ingredients for a less than appetising storm.

In a grand act of missing the point, certain self-regarding foodies have asked why we shudder so at the thought of eating horse. After all, they say, it is a meat like any other. Rejecting it is a sentimental affectation. Not so. It's not the horse. The problem is not knowing how it got in there. And if we don't know how it got there, we don't know where it came from, how it lived or, more to the point, how it died.

As a society, we have agreed to give the big supermarkets a free run at the retail food market, more than 80% of which they now control. In return for that must come a genuine corporate social responsibility, which goes far beyond staging fun runs and making donations to the local hospice. They have become de facto custodians of our food supply chain, a task in which they have obviously failed.

Then again, they have hardly been given encouragement to take those responsibilities seriously. It is telling that the first evidence of horse DNA in beef products emerged not because of the efforts of the regulatory authorities in this country, but due to those of the Food Standards Agency of Ireland. Recent cuts to the budgets of organisations such as Britain's Food Standards Agency have made policing the food chain all the more difficult.

And there are more threats out there. One of the few comforts to be taken from this wretched tale is that it did not originate from within the domestic meat industry. Post the BSE crisis, Britain's increasingly centralised abattoirs have some of the highest standards in the world.

The rigorous system of controls and oversight makes it all but impossible for horsemeat to have entered the food chain from within the UK. Hence all the suspect products originated from the near continent. And yet there are plans circulating within the FSA to relax on-site and independently verifiable meat inspections in favour of inspections by the owners of abattoirs themselves. It must not happen.

If the horsemeat scandal tells us anything it is that we need more government regulation, not less. It's all well and good to tell the supermarkets that they have "ultimate responsibility". But if they will not voluntarily police themselves with genuine rigour, then the state will have to do the job for them.