LAST week I was in Galicia, the far north-westerly part of Spain, which has gone through massive changes in the past decade, partly due to EU-funded infrastructure with decent motorways, better train connections allowing for more tourism and, crucially, easier export to both other parts of Spain and abroad.

Chances are that the next time you go to a restaurant there’ll be a Galician Albariño wine available. Drinking Galician wine allows younger people in that area to make a living where they’re from rather than having to leave.

What I was really interested in seeing in Galicia was its food and drink. In the past 20 years Spain has become a food and drink superpower. The best restaurants in the world are there, as are some of the best food producers.

Small-scale farmers are often asked by restaurants in their area to go back to growing a specific type of bean or aubergine or other vegetable that had once been common so that the restaurants can have highly localised produce, a reason for those from elsewhere to go and visit and for local people to feel that traditions are being revived.

Food and drink is seen as an integral part of Spanish culture, as important as literature or visual art, while also being more accessible and more pleasurable.

For most of the time this food revolution was going on, Galicia was pretty silent. Famous in Spain for really good seafood, great meat and empanadas – pies by any other name – Galicia was never a place with a tradition of doing anything other than the most basic of cooking.

If Scotland’s politics are most closely aligned right now with Catalonia, our food and drink has far more in common with wet, green, bagpipe-playing Galicia.

My friend Jorge Guitan has dedicated his life to writing about and promoting Galician food and drink, and he told me that the past decade has been one of huge changes in the sector.

After the financial crash of 2008 a lot of food producers and restaurants went bust (while we bought more stuff pre the crash, the Spanish ate better food and drank better wine) but even in those dire economic times, Galicians could see that they were missing out on what was happening in the rest of Spain.

A former archeologist, Jorge passionately believes that food and drink is an integral part of a place’s culture. “What quicker and easier way can you learn about a people, even your own, than what you eat and drink?’’ he asks.

‘‘We need to keep our traditions, our empanadas, our seafood, the soups that we are famous for, as well as have places that innovate and do something different with what we have, while not losing the essence of who we are. If we lose that we are just producing smoke and nothing of any worth.”

Galicia now has 11 Michelin-starred restaurants, an obvious sign of success.But most of us don’t eat regularly, if ever, at Michelin-starred restaurants, and I wanted to know what was happening in smaller places, towns such as Verin just near the Portuguese border with a population of 15,000 – about the size of Broxburn – and not a lot going on. How does a place like that live a food and drink revolution?

Verin’s champion is chef Begona Vazquez. After years of working in restaurants in bigger cities across Spain, she went back home and five years ago opened tapas bar O Souto Das Candeas and then a restaurant.

Despite many locals telling her it was a waste of time, that it would never work, no one would care, nothing like that had ever been done in Verin nor ever could be, she runs two successful restaurants. They use local producers, who now have far more solid businesses and which, rather than moving to Vigo or cities further afield, are now restoring neglected vineyards, making cheese or raising livestock.

What it took was her believing it could be done, and enough people among the naesayers to support her to make it possible.

While there I wondered what it would take for places like Broxburn and Johnstone to have their local restaurant championing local produce run by a chef who returned home after years of experience elsewhere making the kind of food that people would travel across Scotland for, they way they now come from across Galicia to eat at Begona’s restaurants.

While you might laugh at the idea, why not? What is it that stops it from happening? Spain is poorer than Scotland. Galicia is one of the poorest parts of Spain and still people spend what they have on travelling to eat in a good restaurant, not necessarily a hugely expensive one – why don’t we?

I have long thought that there are a myriad of ways in which our experience of food prevents us from being Galicia and in the end most of it comes down to our mindset.

We don’t have a food culture. The idea that what we eat could be as important to us culturally as our literature, our art or our politics isn’t something that we Scots would consider. There is no tradition of writers theorising or writing about food in Scotland or anywhere else in the UK.

While drink was written about, from Kingsley Amis on how to get drunk to Neil Gunn on whisky, no renowned author wrote about food as having cultural value. There is no English Brillat Savarin, no Scottish Nestor Lujan.

Virtually all of our tradition of food writing was women writing about housekeeping and so it was seen, like most things women do, to be of no real value. This is reflected today in the almost total lack of food writing in Scotland’s newspapers. While restaurants are reviewed, sadly no one thinks this of great cultural worth. Recipe writers don’t get paid so do it as a PR exercise for their businesses and the only regular food column, rather than restaurant reviews, in any newspaper is written by the owner of a food PR company.

Almost the only other food news you can read is produced by a tiny number of people with no resources to do much more than process press releases.

Compare that to the number of sports writers, mostly men, writing about sports played by men that mostly men watch – with enough journalists to have award categories of their own at press awards – and you can get an idea of the cultural problem. All of us eat three times a day, most of us don’t watch sport.

APART from the lack of food culture here in Scotland, the other problem is our constant exposure to England’s, throttle – as with everything there – by class. Eating good food, well prepared, saving up for it and going out of your way to eat in a good restaurant is seen as a middle-class aspiration rather than simply a pleasure and, outside of parts of Perthshire and Edinburgh, aspirational middle-class culture isn’t something of interest to Scots, so we lose the chance to eat well out of a revulsion of pretence.

Our own attitude to food at its worst is comedic defiance. If you accuse us of deep frying too much, we will fry even more, never letting a vegetable pass our lips. Indeed, a guaranteed way to make the news as a business is to make another bizarre deep-fried calorie-loaded food item that no one sober would eat. We can all take delight in being repulsed by it, safe in the knowledge we’ll never be queuing for it at midnight on a Friday.

Perhaps our best chance to turn this around and create a decent food culture is to harness that attitude and defiantly eat well in the face of expectations. Choose to spend our money on decent produce, demand better restaurants, make careful, discerning eating part of who we are. Eating fantastic food in the face of all contempt could be our new national motto where you can yell get it up ye, while getting down you some really great food.