Consumed: How We Buy Class in Modern Britain. Harry Wallop
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food, but lacked the skill or inclination to cook it themselves.
By 1994, two-thirds of households for the first time had a microwave, and the ready meal had become part of the landscape. The Kievs of this world were put in supermarkets’ ‘best’ ranges, but the supermarkets were also keen to attract working-class consumers to the booming ready meal category. Cut-price lasagnes, curries and stir-fries were developed. So, within one supermarket, Tesco, you can now buy 44p tinned Value meatballs in tomato sauce; treat yourself to a microwavable spaghetti and meatball ready meal, costing £1.87; or you can splash out on a dish of Finest classic Moroccan spiced lamb meatballs for £5.80, to be lovingly heated in the Aga. This allows shoppers to both look down on and envy the choices being made by fellow shoppers right in front of their eyes. With a supermarket ready meal, with the merest glance at the packaging one can immediately start to judge. The top-of-the-range ready meals, such as the ones promoted by Marks & Spencer as part of their recession-busting Dine in for £10 promotion, are deemed smart or even luxuriant. But the ‘good’ ranges – basic, value, budget, in their white boxes and tin foil devoid of any descriptive words – are demonised as the worst of all modern products: inauthentic, processed, and ruinous to the environment and your family’s health.
Of course, both are invariably made in the same factory by the same supplier using more or less the same ingredients. The difference lies in some flavourings, a bit more generous use of the main protein, and crucially the packaging and marketing. White space on the ready meal box is not a cost-cutting measure by the supermarket but is used as a signifier – a quick way, in the 2.3 seconds in which a customer makes up their mind to buy a product, to shout ‘cheap’. On a price-per-calorie basis, the difference is often not that enormous. And often the discount ranges are put in the freezer, in a further prompt to their low-class status.
This schizophrenia about ready meals came to a head in 2004 when Jamie Oliver’s television programme Jamie’s School Dinners led to very public soul-searching, led by the Wood Burning Stovers. A petition with 300,000 signatories was presented to Downing Street. Processed, frozen food was for ill-educated, obese parents who wanted to kill their children, or, as Jamie put it, ‘what we have learnt to call “white trash”’.
Iceland, despite a brief (and disastrous) experiment to become the only national retailer of 100 per cent organic food, has become the main lightning conductor for this hatred. One quite reputable online chat room had a forum by the title: Is Iceland Food Chav Cuisine?13 One poster said: ‘Have you seen the sort of crap they are doing now! Prawns that come on their own spoons, is that meant to be some sort of chavvy amuse bouche?’ Another was more direct: ‘I would rather lick the bottom of a tramp’s ageing sandals than be seen dead in Iceland. If the likes of Kerry Ketamine Katona and bloody Coleen Nolan are associated with the establishment it just makes me turn to trusty old Tesco (and its more civilised clientele).’
This of course was another key factor in how Iceland set itself apart from the discounters – it used a series of low-class celebrities in its adverts. First was Kerry Katona, a former member of Atomic Kitten, who later kept the flickering candle of fame alight by being a runner-up in Celebrity Big Brother and starring in a reality television show about her addiction to cocaine. Then there was Stacey Solomon, former X Factor contestant, who was vilified for being caught smoking while pregnant. These stars were aspirational, but only to the Hyphen-Leighs. The cherry on top of the frozen black forest gateau was when Iceland signed a tie-up with Greggs, which paid to install branded freezers stocked with the full range of pasties, steak bakes and sausage rolls for its customers to cook at home.
Iceland’s rock-bottom image is not something that particularly bothers the company – it helps reinforce its role as supplier of choice to a very specific demographic. In recent years it has flourished more than almost any other supermarket apart from Waitrose.
My nearest park in north London recently spent a lot of money improving the facilities. A new playground was built, the pond was dredged and the café – located inside an old house in the park – was refurbished. It appeared to have gone smoothly, but then the local paper reported: ‘Class war has erupted over Clissold Park’s newly opened café with complaints it’s too snooty and expensive and doesn’t serve up chips. Instead the caf promotes healthy living – and has the likes of cumin, roast carrot, couscous and spiced nut salad and beetroot cake on the menu.’ In a bid to win plaudits from the numerous Wood Burning Stovers in the area, the new management had alienated the equally large number of Asda Mums who used to eat there. This was not, however, just a little mischief-making in the local paper. Action groups were formed, petitions signed, rabbles roused. The leader of the movement said he objected to the café being centred around ‘the most self-conscious of the middle class’.
Twenty years after battles against McDonald’s, consumers were fighting for the right to eat chips, and against cumin. Down with Indian spices! Death to root vegetables! All these flavours and cuisines we have been exposed to over the last 60 years should have freed us from rows over restaurant menus, from being embarrassed to serve your guests something, from trying to hide products in your supermarket shopping basket. But the millions of choices in the supermarket have not wiped out the class divisions, merely reinforced them, because even the simplest decision – of what sandwich to have for your lunch, or coffee to have in the morning – is about status.
The café war was won by the protesters. Beetroot and watercress on focaccia has been struck off the menu.
CHAPTER 2
How important are your birth certificate and maternity ward in deciding what class you end up in? Here we meet the Portland Privateers and the Middleton classes.
2011 was acknowledged to be an abnormally busy year for news. A devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the Arab Spring, bogeymen Bin Laden and Gaddafi both killed in a violent and dramatic way, the News of the World shut down by scandal, the worst riots on Britain’s streets in a generation – all events that demanded acres of coverage and analysis. But there was one story, above all, that obsessed the British press: the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton. This was partly because there had not been a royal wedding on a large scale since 1986 (you need to discount the low-key second marriage of the Prince of Wales and any event involving the Earl and Countess of Wessex); partly because they looked like two attractive young adults genuinely pleased to be tying the knot; partly because many of us love a soldier in uniform, and the Household Cavalry in their pomp, because the sun shone and we were granted an extra bank holiday. But more than anything it was the story of how not just Kate, but also her parents, Carole and Mike, had ended up on the Buckingham Palace balcony sharing the limelight with Britain’s premier family. It was, in some ways, a modern wedding embraced by the YouTube and Twitter generation – the wedding was, up to that point, the most streamed event on the internet. However, at its heart was an old-fashioned story about class, and it was the Middleton family’s very particular status and position which appeared to inject the necessary ‘fairy-tale’ element into the big day.
The Daily Express described the engagement thus: ‘From Pit to Palace; the Middletons used to be miners, now they can boast a future queen.’ The Daily Mail’s take was ‘From Pit to Palace, the first steps in a very upwardly mobile family.’ The Times went with ‘From Pit to Princess, the long journey of the Middleton family.’ Even the Guardian, many of whose readers are of a republican bent, wrote in its leader: ‘Hats off to the prince and commoner Kate.’ The coverage was unequivocal and curiously old-fashioned: not only was there a unanimous belief that the class system very much existed in Britain – and their readers immediately understood the terms and conditions – but that social mobility was also alive and well. During the week of Kate’s engagement, 192 newspaper articles mentioned her family’s class. Apparently it was impossible to mention the Middletons without reference to their supposedly humble background. Kate’s story was one that confirmed there was hope for us all. However miserably horny-handed and proletarian we may be, we could one day end up a Royal Highness waving to the adoring crowd. Karl Marx’s belief was that one day we would become