We had an open weekend here earlier this month for an exhibition and sale of exquisite hand-woven Benares-silk designs. They are the work of a young Delhi designer who has researched historic weaves from India and from the collection at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul to create long and elegant coats and kurtas, woven in jewel-like silks with contrasting detail and unexpected colour in the flash of a lining. I find these clothes irresistible and expected others to do the same, as in many cases they did. I was surprised though by the reaction of other women to pieces that appear to me to be works of art, the fruits of an increasingly valuable and historic skill, updated for a contemporary audience. Whereas in India I have learnt to appreciate the beauty of a weave, I think we, in Europe, have generally been so spoilt by mass-produced clothes, albeit often in expensive natural fabrics, that we have ceased to value, or even to see, the beauty of the hand-crafted stuff.

I have experienced this before at an exhibition, at my house, of Kashmiri shawls, many of which were as much a work of art as a great painting or sculpture, uniquely embroidered over long periods, but still perceived here only as luxury clothes. Hopefully, in India, the advent and increasing use of the easycare polyester sari will not completely destroy the pleasure taken in an exquisitely worked heirloom piece, saved for a wedding and treasured by several generations.

We are so used, in our part of the world, to buying infinitely discardable clothes and so dislocated from real craftsmanship that the idea of purchasing beautiful pieces to pass on to our children and grandchildren has become quite alien except in the most rarefied circles of haute couture or antique collections. It was immediately apparent at our sale that stories of sitting with Benares weavers while they produced small amounts of perfect silk fabric for this or that extraordinary piece cut no ice with an audience of women looking for an Indian bargain and largely interested only in colour and comfort. The lycra generation is not used either to clothes with little give or stretch and is not comfortable in the structured lines of tailored silk.

Beyond that, I have discovered another problem. We British women are really very big and don’t fit happily in sizes made for Indian customers. In spite of our government’s ongoing campaign on obesity as we all get fatter on a diet of food as processed as our clothes, the women who came to our sale were not of overflowing Rubensesque proportions but rather of those of Michelangelo’s sybils in the Sistine Chapel. We are broad in the back and the shoulder — often rather masculine in build, in fact — and the more feminine proportions of Indian women are not ours. Neither do we come from the same mould as more southerly Europeans. When Marks and Spencer first opened in Paris, the British clothes sizes were all too big for French women. They accused us of having big bottoms, but I suspect it was more a question of overall scale. We are made on the statuesque Teutonic or Nordic model of our more northern neighbours and early invaders.

The green movement and government health drives combined with celebrity-chef crusading are having some effects in bringing us to a greater awareness of nature and natural production and packaging. The scourge of the plastic bag, now rife in India, is being fought here as image-conscious supermarkets begin to provide re-usable hessian bags — the very same bags, in fact, that used to be standard issue in India and now are only available in grander shops. Healthy and locally-sourced food has become a sine qua non in smart restaurants where we pay a premium for the pleasure of eating seasonal food that would, in the past, have been the standard diet of all ordinary people, only the wealthiest having access to expensive foreign imports. All the great landowning families lived largely on the produce of their own estates up to, and including, World War II.

When they were in residence in their London houses, supplies were regularly brought up from the country. My father told me that he and my uncle were the least favourite boys in their prep school during the war when a steady supply of rabbits from my grandfather’s land was the staple meat in their diet. My mother recalls, as a small child, not missing much the rationed sugar and sweets in the face of bottomless quantities of milk, butter and cream, which were far beyond the ration allowance of those who did not have their own home-grown source.

It has always been the poorest who have the least choice in food, in clothes and in occupation. The queues for allotment gardens, small plots of land usually on the edges of cities, on which to grow at least a proportion of one’s own food, are not full of the poorest for whom time and money spent on seeds, tools and working the ground is unavailable. Neither are country people the poorest, whether in cottage or in castle, for whom long summer evenings are a time to grow the salads and fresh greens for Sunday lunches or to employ a gardener to do so.

The people who are least green and least healthy are seldom that way by choice. They are not the customers at the Saturday-morning farmers’ markets in central London, where artfully displayed and suitably earthy produce seduces pounds from fat pockets. They are inner-city inhabitants with little time or money, and these days there is such a dislocation from the natural production of food that some children, we are told, believe that milk only comes in bottles and chicken, overgrown with hormones and plumped up with injected liquid, in ready-to-cook plastic packages. Actually anything that requires cooking at all is underbid by the cheap as chips and preparation-free varieties of Kentucky fried chicken and similar fast foods.

The celebrity chefs have done more to educate their television audiences about good food that can also be relatively cheap than any government health programme. There has been a major down turn in sales of factory-farmed chicken since Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall made the miserable lives of broiler factory chickens into television entertainment. But the high cost of free range and organic food compared with mass-produced food will not allow cruel and unhealthy farming methods to end. Jamie Oliver, another young and energetic celebrity chef, has made programmes promoting healthier school dinners, and exposing the disgusting ingredients in much of the food supplied to our children by the state.

These, and similar, initiatives have informed viewers, but cannot solve the problem of cheap versus expensive ingredients, always supposing that so many of us leading busy lives have the time to turn any ingredient into something both healthy and worth eating. The ready meal, even at the most luxurious level, is a different issue. But in an age when time for cooking is also a luxury, we have all turned on the microwave for an instant dinner that supplies us with food as fuel rather than as a pleasure.

So where does all this get us? We must have cheap food just as we must have cheap clothing. I regret only that the imperative for the cheap and convenient, whether in food or in drip-dry polyester and lycra, has reduced our appreciation for that which is really good and naturally beautiful. It seems also that good things that are still accessible in terms of both cost and availability are no longer given merit. Cheap food can be delicious food, that is one of the messages of the celebrity chefs. But unless they are actually serving it at an inflated price in one of their restaurants, it loses its specialness in favour of ready-cooked chicken tikka masala. Likewise, perhaps if my Kashmiri shawls or silk clothes were exhibited as Art in the same way as the antique pieces in the Victoria and Albert Museum, they might have been viewed in a different light. We would have had to raise the prices considerably, of course, to add the essential lustre of the unattainable.