LONDON -- Every industrialized country in the world has this idealized image: the farmer, full of robust common sense, tending his pig or his flock on his small land-holding, sturdily helped by his hardworking wife and children. He is close to the earth and nature. It is true that, in Japan or America's Midwest or France or Ireland these days, this happy family is more likely to be found in paintings than on the land, but the farmer survives the hurricane of globalization in our imaginations.

In rural Britain, devastated by mad cow disease, and now foot-and-mouth disease, that childhood ideal is suddenly seen for what it is: a fantasy, a wish, a nostalgic dream. Producing food of any sort has long been a mass industrial process, dependent on the chemical industry, on mass transport, on methods that leave little to chance and nothing to individual care. Pigs are not raised singly and by hand: They are mere units of production, crushed into breeding and feeding camps, part of the inexorable conveyor belt of agribusiness that will carry them seamlessly from their moment of conception via artificial insemination to routinized slaughter in a large and distant abattoir, then to be sliced and chopped by machine before ending up as pink meat items double wrapped in plastic on the supermarket shelf.

The winners in this transnational business of food production are, in Britain, anonymous. The companies that control the chemicals, feeding and breeding technology are transnational. There are now fewer than 170,000 farms in Britain, many of them employing no permanent staff but dependent on those contract farming companies that can raise the capital to buy the huge and expensive farm machinery that is dictated by global economics. Consumers who once nursed the happy image of the farmer's wife feeding the pig from her slop-pail discovered during the mad-cow crisis that animals do not eat grass, or food as we understand it, but pellets manufactured by a company they have never heard of. (In fact, this current crisis appears to have originated in a farm in the north of England, where the pigs were fed on swill collected from local schools. But the critics here won't yield their point about agribusiness; if animals were not transported rapidly over vast distances, the virus could not leap from farm to farm and proliferate in every part of Britain.)