NOW that’s what I call sacrilege. Dutch rhubarb on sale in a supermarket less than a mile from where the annual Yorkshire rhubarb festival was in full swing…

This was in Wakefield, a city that’s on the apex of the Yorkshire rhubarb triangle where forced rhubarb creaks and groans its way to the candlelight in forcing sheds.

This stuff – the Yorkshire variety of course, for no other will do – is a ruby jewel of gourmand unctuousness. The taste, whether used in sweet or savoury dishes, is sublime. As a result it’s much sought after and the season – like that of English asparagus – is eagerly awaited.

It was ever thus, for Yorkshire forced rhubarb has been grown here since 1877, with the land between Leeds, Wakefield and Bradford forming the world-renowned rhubarb triangle. This area is in fact a frost pocket, and is perfect for growing the ancient plant, whose first recorded use was in 27000BC.

No other grower could compete and at one time there were 200 commercial growers in the triangle, special trains left nightly for Covent Garden and from there, large amounts were sold on into Europe.

There might not be as many growers now but Yorkshire forced rhubarb is the finest ruby in the rhubarb crown. Small wonder then that like Champagne before it, in 2010 it won Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status from Europe.

Which means that poor substitutes like the insipid pink Dutch sticks on Sainsbury’s Wakefield shelves is such an insult. For surely it’s not beyond such a huge organisation with a massive PR outfit at its disposal to have the wherewithal and intelligence to work with local growers to Yorkshire forced rhubarb when its very existence as part of our heritage is being celebrated only a few paces up the road?

But this is supermarkets all over isn’t it? Very often they pay lip service to local produce and when they do deign to stock it see it as justification for whacking up the price because it’s a niche product and therefore bound to be expensive. Which is why local farmers’ markets, farm shops and food festivals are having a field day.

Estimates say there are something like 4,000 farm shops in the UK, which is more than the Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Asda stores combined. They turn over £2.5 billion a year, boost the local economy and reduce transport costs.

Plus there’s something infinitely nicer about getting your fresh-pulled mucky carrots from the farmyard down the road instead of bags of them that have been industrially scrubbed to within an inch of their lives and been sitting in a distribution warehouse for weeks before ending up in your shopping trolley.

The local food ethos is a real alternative to supermarket Britain, increasingly appreciated by consumers who want newer, fresher experiences, and to feel they are making a contribution to local businesses.

But is there a danger that the bubble might burst? Have we become so fixated with farmers’ markets and food festivals that we’re in danger of turning them into outdoor supermarkets when unscrupulous big brother producers muscle in claiming ‘artisan’ credentials and set up stall to the detriment of the smaller craft producer?

I watched one such outfit that had commandeered a big pitch at a Yorkshire food festival and was busily selling pheasant like it was going out of fashion. This was in September, when pheasant are out of the game season – a good seven months out, to be precise. Which means the pheasants were frozen and presumably had been for at least half a year.

Yet people were snapping them up, perhaps without realising that they weren’t buying in season and probably not locally either. But such is the trend we’ve become saturated by it – yet many of us still don’t have an understanding of what really is in season and when, because thanks to the supermarkets, we can get most of our food year round.

The real danger though of bigger producers muscling in on the shop-local trend is to the smaller, real artisan producers who can’t hope to compete against those who elbow their way in to trade on their doorstep.

Add to that farm shops who, for example, buy in Spanish tomatoes – and there are some Yorkshire ones that do just that – or places that claim to have only Yorkshire produce but are busily flogging biscuits from Kent, and you can see why the seasonal local approach sometimes gets blurred at the edges, to the detriment of the truly local producers who are working so hard to create something of quality and taste.