You can walk into a supermarket in Britain and buy a whole chicken for around £4. Less than the price of a paperback book.

Just think about that for a minute.

That chicken has been bred, hatched and reared. Someone has fed it and cared for it. Crops have been grown to feed it. It has been transported, slaughtered, butchered, packaged, chilled, transported again and put onto a supermarket shelf. There are farmers, processors, drivers, butchers and retailers involved along the way, yet somehow, at the end of all of that, the entire animal can cost us four quid.

We have become so accustomed to cheap food that perhaps we have stopped asking the obvious question: how can it possibly be this cheap?

The uncomfortable truth is, cheap food isn't really cheap. Someone, somewhere, is paying the rest of the bill.

I have spent much of my working life talking to people about the price of food. Why does this chicken cost more than that one? Why is grass-fed beef often more expensive? Why does food from a small farm cost more than something apparently ‘identical’ in the supermarket? These are all completely reasonable questions, particularly now with a continued cost of living crisis.

Food has to be affordable. There is no point building a better food system if only a tiny proportion of the population can afford to eat from it. I have always felt uncomfortable with the idea of good food becoming another marker of wealth. But I think we are asking the wrong question.

Instead of endlessly asking why proper food costs what it does, perhaps we should be asking how other food has become so cheap.

There is a difference between food being affordable and food being artificially cheap.

The latter usually means that some of the true cost of producing it has simply disappeared from the price tag. Except, of course, it hasn't disappeared at all, it has just landed somewhere else, often invisible to the shopper.

Sometimes the farmer pays.

British farmers are being asked to do an extraordinary number of things. We want them to produce plentiful food, look after wildlife, restore soils, protect rivers, plant hedges, store carbon, maintain beautiful landscapes and raise animals to ever-higher welfare standards. Quite rightly, too, but at the same time, we expect them to produce food for less and less money.

Those two things don't easily add up. Good farming takes time. It takes skilled people. It takes land. If you want an animal to grow slowly, outdoors, with plenty of space and a natural diet, there is, of course, a cost attached to that. If you want a farmer to leave room for deep hedgerows, ponds, wildflowers and all the glorious messiness that nature requires, to ensure that land isn't being pushed to produce the maximum possible yield above all else, there inevitably is a cost to that too, especially in a world of ever increasing pressure on land use.

None of this is particularly complicated and yet we have somehow created a food system in which we ask farmers to deliver all of those public goods while retailers simultaneously demand they produce ever-cheaper food.

When the price doesn't cover the true cost of production, something has to give. It might be the farmer's income. It might be animal welfare. It might be soil health, water quality or biodiversity. Quite often, it is several of them at once.

I think part of the problem is that we have become incredibly disconnected from what food actually is. A steak is not simply a steak. It is a small piece of an animal that may have taken three years to rear. Before it was a steak it was an animal standing in a field, eating grass grown from healthy soil, drinking water and being cared for by a farmer.

A loaf of bread starts with a field of grain.

Milk starts with grass and a cow and someone getting out of bed every morning to tend to her.

When we reduce food to something neatly wrapped in plastic, it becomes very easy to forget everything that came before it. Then price becomes the obvious comparison. Chicken is chicken. Beef is beef. Milk is milk.

Except they aren't.

Two apparently identical pieces of meat can represent completely different farming systems.

One might come from a landscape rich in hedges, insects, birds and healthy soil with little use for any medication. Another might rely heavily on imported feed and external inputs as well as a full quota of vaccines and drugs.

One animal may have grown slowly and naturally, living symbiotically with the land, fertilising the soils and treading in seeds. Another may have been bred specifically to reach its slaughter weight as quickly and efficiently as possible, eating a high calorie diet, rarely stepping a hoof onto fresh pasture and requiring an exhausting amount of mucking out, leaching trace chemicals into the soil. Those differences rarely fit neatly onto a supermarket price label.

There is a trap in conversations like this, and I think it is important we avoid it. The answer cannot be to tell everyone to simply spend more money on food. For lots of people, there isn't more money. When you are trying to feed a family and your mortgage, electricity bill and everything else has gone up, the £4 chicken is understandably appealing.

I don't think people should be made to feel guilty for buying the food they can afford.

If we want a better food system, it has to work for ordinary people as well as those that have more freedom of choice. But perhaps there is another way of thinking about value.

Eating better meat, for example, doesn't have to mean eating an enormous grass-fed steak every night. It might mean eating a little less meat, but buying better when we do. It might mean using cheaper cuts and cooking them slowly using an energy efficient crockpot. It might mean remembering how to make stock from bones, eating seasonally when ingredients are naturally abundant and wasting far less of what we buy.

Some of the best food I know is incredibly simple and doesn’t require clever know how in the kitchen. A slowly braised piece of meat. Beans cooked with a ham hock. Vegetables roasted in dripping. Yesterday's roast turned into tomorrow's lunch and the next days.

For most of human history, this was simply how people cooked. Good ingredients were valuable, so you didn't waste them. Perhaps somewhere along the way, ‘cheap food’ allowed us to forget that.

This is something I think about a lot in my work with farmers and increasingly through what we are building at Pipers & Co. We spend an awful lot of time in the food industry asking what consumers want.

What cuts do they want? What vegetables? What size? What shape? What time of year?

There is another question I think we should ask more often:

Nature doesn't produce everything in neat, predictable quantities according to a supermarket buying schedule. Animals are not made entirely of steaks and chicken breasts. Farms have gluts. Seasons and weather patterns change. Some cuts are plentiful and others scarce. A regenerative farm is a living system, not a factory production line.

One of the things we are trying to do at Pipers & Co is shorten the gap between those farms and the people eating their food.

That means working directly with small-scale farmers and producers and finding a genuine market for what they produce, rather than continually asking them to bend their farming systems around what the market finds easiest to sell. It’s not revolutionary, in many ways it is incredibly old-fashioned, but it does begin to put value back where it belongs.

Every time we buy food, money travels backwards through a supply chain.

The question is how much of it eventually reaches the person who grew or reared it.

The shorter and more transparent that chain becomes, the easier it is to understand what our money is supporting.

A healthy farm.

A viable livelihood.

A local abattoir.

A traditional breed.

A hedgerow full of birds.

Living soil.

Or simply the ability for another generation to look at farming and think: yes, I could make a life doing this.

We shouldn't romanticise a past where food was scarce or where families had to spend a huge proportion of their income simply feeding themselves. Affordable food is a good thing, but there is a point at which cheap stops meaning efficient and starts meaning that someone else is absorbing the cost.

Perhaps it is the farmer. Perhaps it is the animal. Perhaps it is the river, the soil or the disappearing insects and birds. And perhaps, eventually, it is all of us.

So the next time you see a whole chicken for £4, please ask the question.

Because if the price we pay doesn't cover the true cost of producing our food, someone else is paying the difference and that might make cheap food one of the most expensive things we buy.