We worry too much about food in this country. That's probably why we throw so much away. This wasn't always the case. Take a stroll back in time to the 1920s: look around this jerky black-and-white world. No one cares what they eat, so long as they are eating something. They scratch in the mud all day so they can gnaw their blackened fingernails for sustenance in the evening. Peas are exotic. Battered potatoes a lah-di-dah delicacy. These people dream of a horsemeat value burger. Dream of it.

Today, a cheery splash of errant horse DNA in our mechanically recovered meat product and we indignantly vomit in protest. But then cheap food disgusts us in general. In 2013 a range of unofficial food laws requires every British citizen to pretend to be a distinguished gourmet 24 hours a day. It's as though we avoid junk for religious reasons. As recently as the late 1990s it was still A-OK to walk down the street bunging Salt 'n' Vinegar Chipsticks down your shouthole. Now it's illegal. Chipsticks are illegal. Even thinking about Chipsticks is illegal. You're breaking the law right now. Also, you really want some Chipsticks.

There are loopholes. Tiny gaps in the madness that permit some wriggle room. Just as film-makers in the 1950s discovered they could openly flog softcore porn if they pretended to make educational films about nudist colonies, so contemporary snack food often disguises itself as something hoity-toity and respectable. Bye-bye Chipsticks, hello thrice-cooked chippalettoes in sober packaging adorned with tasteful font choices and words like "artisan" and "finest": the hand-picked organic figleaf of respectability. You still shovel them down your neck like you're conducting a suicide-bombing campaign against your own arteries, but you do so while watching Borgen instead of Take Me Out, you sophisticate, you.

The great minced horse scandal of 2013 has been focused on "value" burgers, which means while many are disgusted, few can be entirely surprised. As a consumer, you implicitly understand that each time you buy a "value" meat product you are entering into a gentleman's agreement with the producer. Your end of the deal: you won't ask awkward questions and you'll swallow as fast as you can. Their end: they'll program their slaughtering robots to pick out any visible toenails and mince the eyelids so finely you won't feel the lashes tickling your throat on the way down. You paid 10p and ate something vaguely carcass-flavoured: you're fully aware you're eating meat regurgitated through a sieve in the Twilight Zone. You know damn well the tuppenny beef disc you're chewing consists of sinewy globules and bloody tumours sluiced off a malformed skeleton by a high-pressure hose in a flyblown abattoir, smashed into patties by an automated fist-pounding machine, bulked out with sawdust and fishfood and papier-mache, packed into boxes and piled high for economy of scale. You're either trying not to think about it, or you genuinely don't care, in which case good for you. Eat what you want.

Unexpected surprises aren't confined to the bargain basement. Lest we forget, supermarket burgers are available in fancy Downton Abbey formats too. Veal. Venison. Monocled beef. The high-class callgirls of the burger world. Yet even in this gentrified sector of the chilled cabinet it's not always entirely obvious what you're getting. Waitrose, for example, offers a top-of-the-range Heston Blumenthal Lamb & Cucumber burger: £3.50 for two, so you might want to consider applying for an interest-only mortgage first. They look pretty good and I'm sure they taste magnificent – like a recently slaughtered ovine angel softly bleeding to death on to your tongue – but if you squint at the list of ingredients on the back of the packet you'll see the words "pork shoulder". Because that's what you look for in a lamb burger – lashings and lashings of pig.

Oh but sorry Muslims! Sorry Jews! You should have read the fine print. Never mind. Try escaping to the posh sausage section instead. There you'll find Heston's Duck & Sour Cherry Sausages, which sound even grander and less likely to contain anything oinky.

But hang on a minute. Ingredients: 45% duck, 39% pork shoulder, squished into a hog casing. That's a lot of pig for a duck sausage. Maybe it's a bonus, a sort of Easter egg. Visitors to the Ocado website certainly sound impressed. "The filling of these sausages was very nice," says one. "You could tell it was something other than just pork and you did get a few cherries thrown in."

Mmm! Sounds good enough to let someone else eat. Except the same reviewer then goes on to complain that the skin was so tough they had to painstakingly remove it all before eating, which makes them sound a bit like a cannibal moaning about having to use their dinner knife to scrape a layer of melted condom off a roast penis before they can get to the meat.

Because ultimately that's what shopping in the posh section gets you, see: a better class of revolting imagery to contemplate over dinner. Bon appetit.