Sidelines - Who ate all the pies? Who ate all the pies? Why it was Leeds, of course . . .

Leeds, according to a new survey by Tesco, is "the surprise pie-eating capital in Britain". More than 1.2 million pies of all kinds were eaten in Leeds in the past six months alone. What is surprising about this is not made clear in the accompanying press release. There are surprises in the survey, such as the fact that more salmon en croute "pies" are eaten in Essex than anywhere else, and that Chester is tops for consumption of Aberdeen Angus shortcrust steak and onion pie, while the folk of Southampton put away more individual deep-fill Scotch steak pies than anywhere else in the country.

The facts, I fully admit, I could never have guessed, but as for the overall eminence of Leeds . . . Personally, I would have thought it was perfectly logical that more pies should be eaten in Leeds than anywhere else. Pie-eating, I have always assumed, is a northern thing.

When I was growing up in York, pork pie and salad was our standard summer tea - my dad would try to teach me to appreciate the gelatine in a pork pie, but I never could - and my ideal lunch, the one I always "cooked" when left to my own devices, was frozen shepherd's pie (unfrozen for the purposes of eating, of course) and baked beans.

I called a spokesman for Tesco, who agreed that the north was the main market for pies, and when I asked why he said: "Ah! It's one for the sociologists." I suggested that pies, providing as they do a cheap, filling meal (I am not talking about salmon en croute here, obviously), were traditionally associated with those in relative poverty, and that there were always more people in relative poverty, relatively speaking, in the north than the south.

But the PR man successfully detected that I was saying something negative here, albeit in very relative terms, and he could not agree. Instead, he pointed out that in these times of rising prosperity, "the demand for traditional British pies has never been higher". I suggested that this genuinely was surprising and, after a lot of agonising, he agreed. "You'd have thought people would have moved on from pies," he confided, "but it seems they haven't."

At Pukka Pies - big suppliers to the catering trade - they're very happy about this but insist that pie-eating is spread evenly across the country if you take into account pasties, more of which are eaten in the south. For some reason, this bothered me, but the answer to my question: "At which football ground are the most pies consumed per capita?" cheered me up no end. "Rotherham," said the Pukka Pies man. "One pie is eaten by every three people over the course of the season."

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