Fishing lines: Time to kiss the maggot goodbye

What would Izaak Walton have made of bait that looks like animal droppings? I suspect Piscator, Venator and all the other members of the Tor family would have muttered something rude in Latin, and disappeared off with the milkmaid.

Walk into a tackle shop nowadays and the air no longer reeks of maggots. Those vats of wriggling grubs in coats of yellow, red, pink and even green that fascinated and appalled every non-angler are being rapidly replaced by aseptic plastic tubs of colourful droppings. Their very name - pellets - has animal and vegetable connotations. But today's bait comes from the wiles of the chemist rather than death and blowflies.

I went inside a maggot farm once. It was a scene from Dante, only 10 times worse. My abiding memory is willing myself not to scream as hundreds of flies landed on me, thinking I was a particularly large dead fish.

The owner, totally unconcerned, talked about knowing when "his" flies were happy because of the noise they made. I was too scared to speak. I feared ending up like the old lady who swallowed a fly, except in my case it would have been several dozen of them.

Even worse was the sight of a muscular teenager, stripped to the waist (maggots generate a remarkable amount of heat), standing in a vast pit up to his thighs in maggots and shovelling the heaving millions into large containers.

Though seven miles of pipes and huge fans dispersed most of the smell, the sickly-sweet ammonia aroma stayed with me for days. And so I've never begrudged paying for maggots. The people who produce them for a living earn every penny.

Once, being a maggot farmer was a pretty good living. I heard of one who saved nearly £450,000 (it's a cash business) from his maggoty dealings. But no one's earning anything like that now, thanks to pellets.

Carp are the fish of the moment, and carp love pellets, made up of proteins, amino acids, emulsifiers, flavourings, enhancers and essential oils.Flavours include blueberry, black-currant and strawberry. One tackle dealer told me he used to buy 70 gallons of maggots a week; now he's down to seven. Today's fish eat more healthily than most of us.

It's not only carp that are partial to pellets. Almost every freshwater species, from little gudgeon to big barbel, gobbles them up. I haven't heard of a salmon being caught on a pellet, but it's just a matter of time.

Anglers like them too. Pellets are clean and inert. They smell like summer rather than a dead badger. If the container top comes off, you can pick them up. They don't escape, to reappear months later as hordes of flies.

But I miss maggots. I miss the dirt, the smell, the screams, the moans when they escape in the fridge. To me, pellets are a bait invented by vegans and approved by the EU. Bring back junk fish food.