Tripe and bollocks ...

...are absolutely delicious. One of my abiding memories is of eating fried goats' testicles with a deaf mute Greek goatherd on the island of Tilos, whilst he gesticulated about what it would do for my libido. But what does this have to do with the credit crunch? A lot in France apparently, offal sales are booming.

“It’s not that people have become a lot poorer in this country, but they think they’re poorer because of all the talk of the crisis,” said Mr Arnoult, whose family has been selling les produits tripiers since the 1870s. “So they are looking to reduce the food budget and they are eating more offal.”

This appears to be the latest manifestation of lifestyle politics; lifestyle panic. And this is the strange thing about it all. For years a mainstay of the posh papers' weekend supplements have been middle class downshifters parading their moral superiority about the joys of a new found frugality. Now others are discovering it and suddenly we are all in crisis and being exhorted to spend, spend, spend.

And what a crisis this is if you read the papers. The Guardian headline today screamed about a "Bloodbath on the High Street". What horror has been unleashed now? Terrorist bombs, serial killers on the rampage, a surfeit of offal sellers? No, it is only that people aren't buying as much this Christmas. Retail sales in October were down by 0.1%.

Does this overwrought hyperbole mean that all the fears generated by the financial crisis are themselves nothing but tripe and bollocks? Not really, there are genuine victims of the banks' ingenuity, but they are a long way away from the fretting middle classes. Perhaps, too, the crisis shows that radical critics of consumerism, who have been going on about it since the inception of the Industrial Revolution, were actually on to something. I suppose that it has also marked a revival of social democracy as a tool of economic management. Who knows, Labour might even win the next election.

As for the offal eaters, my guess is that it won't last long and that they will soon be back wasting the money needed to keep a peasant alive in the developing world for a year on a single meal of Roast Foie Gras "Benzaldehyde". Global inequality is with us still.