Has tinned salmon gone the way of all flesh?

There's a Gary Larson cartoon I'm fond of which depicts a group of juvenile delinquent dinosaurs bullying a passing mammal. As they catcall and sneer at its pelt – I believe the hurtful term "fuzzball" is used – one of the dinosaurs is distracted by a single snowflake which announces that an ice age is in the offing and that all this swaggering arrogance is about to be rebuked by nature. Not very good palaeontology, I guess, but a nice illustration of the way that extinction usually creeps up on a species.

And, while I wouldn't want to set off panic buying just yet, I think I spotted a single snowflake in yesterday's announcement of changes to the cost of living basket, the assembly of goods the Office of National Statistics uses to calculate inflation. As always, there were arrivals and departures, all closely scrutinised as a spectrograph of the national lifestyle.

Loose-leaf tea was out and aluminium step-ladders were in, darts were gone and DVD players had arrived. But the relegation that brought a pang to me was the demotion of tinned salmon. Once top of the food chain when it came to Sunday afternoon tea, tinned salmon has begun the long slow slide into product extinction.

Maybe it won't happen – even though cheap farmed salmon is slowly educating the national palate away from what I still, at some level, believe to be the real thing (when a 40-pound salmon beached itself outside our prep school one term and was fed to us with great ceremony there was almost universal disappointment among the boys, who all felt that it lacked the briny definition of the cylindrical kind). Maybe tinned salmon will linger on – as a kind of giant panda of the canned seafood section. But I wouldn't depend on it.

Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but it's a mere pussycat when compared to the ferocious ecology of the supermarket shelves, which oversees a continuing mass extinction of brands and products that can't keep up. Darwin's defining image of a crowded river bank into which competing organisms drive a wedge of opportunity, dislodging others, could very easily be adapted to the jostling, elbowing contest for shelf space in a modern supermarket.

But where nature is completely indifferent to the extinction of species, consumers aren't. I haven't eaten tinned salmon for decades now, having defected to tuna long ago, but I imagine there are people out there for whom the texture of life would be hugely impoverished without a regular hit of the pink stuff.

Products knit themselves irretrievably into our emotional life – which is why the BBC America website can charge its homesick customers $4.85 for a small bottle of Dettol. America has cheaper antiseptics by the truckload, but none of them smell like Mummy.

And whenever a product is delisted, invisible ripples of grief spread out through the land. Even philosophers can't be philosophical about this kind of thing. I remember reading a story about Isaiah Berlin, who had written in dismay to Marcus Sieff, then head of M&S, after the company delisted a brand of hickory smoked almonds to which he'd become particularly devoted. Lord Sieff had a crate of them delivered to All Souls – a lifetime supply if Sir Isaiah nibbled cautiously. Unfortunately this is not a service that Marks offers to everyone.

What's more, commercial success is no defence against termination. When Cadbury hubristically attempted to take on Mars with the Aztec bar the latter quickly found an appreciative public. It wasn't actually a failure at all; it simply wasn't successful enough to match the company's ambitions, and it had to go, never mind how its fans felt. So if you cherish tinned salmon, don't wait until it's too late – eat this endangered species now.

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk