I WATCHED Richard Lochhead, the environment secretary, defending the need for a Scottish food policy on Newsnight. His interrogator, Gordon Brewer - in full-blown Type A personality grilling mode - wanted to know why we need such a policy when the government could just tell people to eat more Kenyan green beans from the supermarket. Lochhead tried good-humouredly to offer environmental and health arguments, but these came over as lame and unconvincing.

The same can be said for the Scottish government's new food policy initiatives announced by Lochhead last week. If this was a dissertation, it would surely be handed back with the comment: "Some good ideas. A promising start. Now go back, do a lot more reading and thinking, then rewrite it."

To be fair, Scotland's first national food and drink policy is as yet embryonic, a work in progress. The latest rag-bag of ideas announced by Lochhead is about as contentious as motherhood and apple pie. It includes investigations into affordable access to food and "Scottish" food labelling; a campaign to improve the quality and visibility of Scottish produce in restaurants and pubs; a cooking bus that will tour the country, and a new government catering contract which emphasises the procurement of seasonal produce.

Policy-lite, our national food strategy so far appears to be solely the bureaucratic outcome of the Scottish government's "national food conversation". Instead of a coherent strategy document, we get an assortment of inoffensive policy ideas, distilled from the brainstorming of "stakeholders", focus groups and bloggers by diligent civil servants. What it glaringly lacks is any inspiring vision, any clear sense of where the Scottish government really wants to take us. It has all the hallmarks of a exercise that will produce the odd little improvement, but dissipate most of its energy as the government falls back on consumer organisations, quangos, celebrity food gurus and the food industry to do its work for it.

That's a great pity. The Scottish government is to be commended for being ahead of Westminster in grasping the need for a holistic, cross-departmental national food policy, but it must take much more of a lead. We've been served a starter of light and frothy crowd-pleasing initiatives, rather like the first minister's high-profile, if brief, experiment eating only Scottish food - a copycat of the pioneering Fife Diet project. But where's the meaty, substantial main course? Messrs Lochhead and Salmond must start using the tools at their disposal if their food policy is going to be anything other than a naive, airy-fairy wish list. So far, it smacks of being all things to all men, but food is a battlefield and the government will inevitably make enemies if it is truly going to advance its stated goals.

Lochhead reassures us that the Scottish government wants to keep Scotland GM-free - a commitment which, mysteriously, appears nowhere in its food policy - but this will put it on collision course with the National Farmers Union in Scotland, Westminster, and the powerful global biotech industry. Let's hope Holyrood sticks to its guns. And given this anti-GM stand, Holyrood's food policy should surely contain a statement of support - better still, a package of support - for alternative, small-scale, ecological and organic farming methods.

Elsewhere, one lone cooking bus touring Scotland, though a valiant and worthwhile project, is hardly going to staunch the national haemorrhage of cooking skills. If the Scottish government really means to get the nation cooking again, why aren't Lochhead's colleagues in education drawing up measures to scrap food technology as a subject and replace it with compulsory, practical cooking lessons ?

Finally, asking caterers nicely to source more local, healthy food is a waste of breath. Why not bring in regulations, backed by incentives, that require every institution in the land - schools, hospitals, care homes, prisons etc - to source 80% of their food locally, or at least from Scotland? That would achieve a whole lot more than slapping saltires on every food in sight.

Lochhead and the first minister are to hold a cosy summit with supermarket bosses to enlist them in supporting moves to improve the nation's diet and increase the amount of healthy, local food eaten. Let's hope they realise that supermarkets are part of the problem, not the solution.

These highly centralised and often transnational brands are the antithesis of local food, amoral corporations driven by profit. The fact that they continue to sell booze cheaper than water should already provide a clue to their motivation.

Rather than jumping into bed with these sharks, the Scottish government should be looking to reform our planning system so that the big chains can no longer bully their way into communities and kill off local retailing and wholesaling. It should be coming up with packages of fiscal support, such as council tax rebates, that will shore up all independent local initiatives (farmers' markets, small food and farm shops) and consolidate Scotland's fledgling local food revolution.

Lochhead threatens, nebulously, that the government is prepared to "get tough" to advance its goals. If so, when, how, and with whom?