The flames turning the night sky orange, the stench of burning flesh - no wonder the talk in the countryside is of apocalypse. "We are on the threshold of Armageddon," warns the National Farmers Union man in Devon, girding himself for another night of slaughter, another bonfire of the carcasses. It is, to be sure, a medieval image, those piles of animal corpses being put to the flame - the pictures in the papers looking more like tapestries than photographs. And the panic is real. Farmers, already reeling after BSE and falling food prices, fear this could be the final blow. The Samaritans are on standby.  The rest of the nation stands back, heeding the warnings to keep its distance. To urban folk, this whole scene looks like one of those 1950s sci-fi tales - Quatermass or Day of the Triffids. Sealed-off farms, a deadly virus, government warnings to stay away: all that's needed now is for the army to move in. But townies have two other reactions to the foot and mouth epidemic sweeping Britain - reactions which could be as decisive for the farmers' fate as the virus itself. Neither will bring much comfort.  The first is confusion. Amid all the talk of European export bans, cancelled rugby matches and delayed general elections, plenty of people are still stuck on rather more basic questions. Like: what the hell is it? And: how might it affect me?  I've heard people shouting at the radio and TV, demanding answers to those questions. BSE they could understand: they knew cows went mad, visibly stumbling and slobbering in TV footage played over and over again, and that humans could contract a terrifying and lethal version of the disease.  Foot and mouth sounds so much simpler than bovine spongiform encephalopathy but my guess is that most non-rural folk remain baffled as to what it is. From the tone of the media coverage, and the end-of-the-world warnings from farmers, most Britons probably reckon F&amp;M is a killer disease which, once it touches a herd, rapidly wipes out the lot. As for humans, it's surely a death sentence to eat meat infected with the bug: your foot probably falls off and your mouth seizes up forever. Why else would government rules insist that infected animals be slaughtered instantly and the disease be eradicated so absolutely? It must be a merciless plague.  Not quite. If human beings eat meat infected with F&amp;M, they do not die; at most they might get the odd cold sore. As for animals, foot and mouth rarely kills them either. Some of the herd's sick or young are vulnerable, but for most a bout of F&amp;M means little more than blisters around the mouth, on the teats and between the hooves, an occasional spot of   lameness and a loss of appetite. The animal soon recovers and the whole thing lasts no more than two to three weeks.  So why all the fuss? The clue is in that last symptom: loss of appetite. For a sheep with F&amp;M stops gaining weight, an infected cow produces less milk. The animal does not suffer or die - it just becomes less productive, yielding a less juicy lamb chop or fewer pints of milk. In an industry that has become ultra-intensive - squeezing every last drop of value from a sheep, pig or cow - even this slight loss of productivity can make the difference between profit and loss. Put simply, foot and mouth is an economic disease.  A less-intensive brand of farming might take the old 19th-century attitude to F &amp;M: let it run. Back then, says agricultural historian Abigail Woods, who writes on the topic in today's Society section, "no one took any notice of it at all, no one batted an eye-lid." Today's consumers wouldn't notice the difference either.  But farmers can't just let foot and mouth come in, do its worst and blow away - even if that would be the most rational response. Foreign markets won't tolerate infected meat even if we would: the farmers' export trade would collapse. The law demands an extreme response too. A long outdated insistence that British meat be absolutely disease-free has led to the slaughter-on-sight policy, even when it is the emergency measures, not the virus itself, which really threatens farmers' livelihoods. The cure is worse than the disease.  Still, don't expect too much sympathy from the rest of us. For if this outbreak has triggered our incomprehension of modern farming, it has also exposed our indifference to its plight. Typical of the urban mood was Ken Livingstone's instant response, calling on the Countryside Alliance to cancel its planned march on London. With an unerring instinct for popular feeling, the mayor guessed at most Londoners' attitude to the farmers: keep out, and take your mucky boots and strange germs with you. The Alliance duly called the event off.  It's not hard to explain this urban chilliness toward the countryside. BSE was a turning point, breaking forever the cosy Farmer Giles myth of yore: suddenly Britons saw farms as giant agri-businesses, animal factories with profit the only motive. Never mind that many farmers didn't realise they were turning their livestock into cannibals: the trust was broken.  The countryside's war on the Labour government has not helped. Not because they don't have a good case: the depletion of rural bus services and post offices is real. What turns townies off is that country folk never marched on London about any of  those concerns: it was only when Labour moved against foxhunting that the countryside got organised. If the Alliance had been formed to save village schools, rather than the right to kill foxes, perhaps they would have enjoyed wider sympathy.  There's one more cause of the town's cold shoulder to the country and it's an irony. For it was Conservative governments - the farmers' party - who per suaded Britons that if an industry is uneconomic, then it must go, even if that destroys communities and their way of life. Pit villages made that plea in the 1980s but no one listened - least of all the farmers who kept voting Tory. Yet now they insist that Britain must subsidise their industry, even if we could import their product more cheaply from abroad. If that logic couldn't save the miners, why should it save them?  The farmers will argue that food is a special case. Britons, they reckon, remember the war - where we had to feed ourselves to stay alive. But few hold to that logic anymore: that's why Thatcherism didn't mind savaging our steel industry, even though we might need that one day to arm ourselves. No, it's a globalised world now; Britons won't mind filling their shopping trolleys from abroad. They do so already.   That sounds harsh and it is. It also lets us off the hook too easily. For if farmers have been driven to ever more intensive methods, it's partly to satisfy our demand for cheap food. As the novelist Jonathan Coe, whose What a Carve Up! skewered the food industry in the mid-90s, told me yesterday, "absolute consumer choice" comes at a terrible price - and it is the farmers now facing ruin who seem set to pay it.  So Frederick Forsyth can hint darkly in the Daily Mail that the foot and mouth virus was introduced deliberately, as a Labour plot against the countryside. But most Britons know better. They know that if farmers are reaping a bitter harvest now, they - and we - sowed much of it ourselves.