Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. Joanna Blythman
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apples are virtually unsaleable elsewhere in Europe as the best Goldens are golden and come from higher altitudes, such as Quercy. Another example is salads. Now nearly all the salad produce sold in supermarkets for the greater part of the year is sourced in Holland even though it has no flavour. But it looks perfect and that’s what the supermarkets want.’
In 2003, there was another instance of the supermarket assertion that consumers are besotted with appearance to the exclusion of all other considerations. When the House of Commons International Development Committee grilled supermarket representatives about filling their produce shelves with only cosmetically perfect produce, one MP challenged the supermarket contention that consumers would only buy mangetouts, Cox’s Orange Pippins or other produce if it were all a uniform size and shade. Senior supermarket figures assured the committee that this was indeed the case. Sainsbury’s senior manager for sustainability and product safety refuted any suggestion of blame, identifying the consumer as the problem. ‘The UK customer is known to be the foremost in Europe for being fussy about appearance. You can’t deny that.’ Substitute the words ‘UK supermarket chains are’ for ‘The UK customer is’, and you have a sentence that more accurately reflects who calls the shots.
One farmer told me how he goes to Women’s Institutes and other community groups talking about supporting local agriculture. He argues that supermarkets are trying to brainwash the public into doing what the supermarkets want. ‘I hold up examples of naturally misshapen but perfectly wholesome vegetables and say, “Look, the supermarkets say you don’t want these.” In every case, they tell me otherwise.’ I asked an experienced fruit and vegetable wholesaler if it was true that British shoppers are interested only in looks. He said, ‘Mrs Average shopper is now a younger person who only shops in supermarkets and has never known the joys of full-flavoured fruit and vegetables. If her attitude is “If it looks good, it will do,” it’s not her fault. Supermarkets sell us what they want to sell us.’
It’s embarrassing, isn’t it, to come from a country with a bad food culture? But that’s how other countries see us: as a nation hooked on junk food. It’s part of our national stereotype. Au pairs return home to regale their astounded families with tales of what British households eat. Visitors remark on the absence of food shops; their jaws drop at the sight of legions of office workers bolting down their lunchtime sandwiches or schoolchildren breakfasting on packets of crisps and cans of coke.
Theories about the roots of Britain’s gastronomic cluelessness stretch back to the enclosures and the Industrial Revolution – the dislocation of food-producing peasants from the countryside to make an industrial workforce and so on. But increasingly, historical explanations seem inadequate to explain fully our current predicament. One contemporary factor is staring us in the face. No country in Europe is so reliant on supermarkets for its food shopping. These days, many British consumers simply see no alternative to shopping in supermarkets. In countries where people eat better, they still do.
The food writer Matthew Fort illustrated this point amply when he described the shopping possibilities in the kilometre-long Via Tribunali in Naples:
In it were nine bars or cafés, one rosticceria, three wine shops, three fruit and veg shops (plus several more round various corners), sixteen grocers/delis, four fishmongers, five butchers, a cheese shop … three pizza shops, one tavola calda restaurant, one trattoria and two bakers. And that was besides the hairdressers, electrical shops, tobacconists, shoe shops and clothes shops.
Each was quite small and differed in character from the next … an independent entity, a source of occupation and income for the family that ran it. It was as far removed from the homogeneity of the average British shopping experience as it was possible to imagine. In terms of life, social exchange, sense of community, competitiveness, service abundance, variety and sheer energy, it made me realise what we have lost, what our spineless acquiescence to the culture of supermarkets and retail chains has cost us.
Our supermarkets – and the bodies that lobby on their behalf – like to argue that they are the most comprehensive and sophisticated in the world. They can put every food experience to be had on the planet into the British consumer’s trolley, setting a standard for safety and quality that no foreign chain can match. ‘Food democracy is consumers having access to an unprecedented range of safe food, all year round and at all price points, regardless of where they live. Through economies of scale, innovation and investment, food retailing has helped to deliver a level of food democracy in the UK unimagined before the Second World War,’ said Richard Ali, food policy director of the British Retail Consortium. Using this liberation rhetoric, he presented supermarket domination of the UK’s grocery spend as a symptom of our healthy open-mindedness, evidence of an improvement in how we feed ourselves. ‘Unfortunately there are those who would wish to introduce the modern day equivalent of the Soviet Decree on Food Dictatorship by encouraging collusion and restricting choice. Any such backwards step holds huge dangers to our economy and people’s quality of life,’ warned Mr Ali. A Britain in which supermarket hegemony is challenged is invariably portrayed by our large retailers as a grim, inconvenient, post-rationing nightmare where no one has ever heard of kiwi fruit and we are all condemned to a monotonous diet of dull, labour-intensive raw ingredients. ‘Queuing at one store then trudging down Watford High Street in the rain to another shop … Is this what people actually want to go back to?’ asked Tesco’s chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy.
Using this device, supermarkets habitually present themselves as a progressive solution to Britain’s food difficulties when in fact their enormous power to determine what ends up on our plates is a major part of the problem of our food culture. It is no coincidence that the country most attached to supermarket shopping has the worst eating habits in Europe because we have effectively surrendered control over what we eat to a few powerful chains. In the guise of giving us choice, they simply sell us what suits them.
A classic example of this is the chilled sandwich. The prototype of the chilled sandwich was pioneered by Marks & Spencer. This non-supermarket food retailer has always been a de facto research and development laboratory and trendsetter for other supermarket chains, which habitually follow its lead. In UK supermarket terms, it is a huge success story, a food-retailing breakthrough. ‘The Marks & Spencer sandwich is now an icon, representing freshness, quality and flavour (a welcome replacement for the previous cliché of the tired old British Rail sandwich),’ observed one approving industry commentator.
But is it such a great leap forward? Prepacked in its plastic carton, the modern chilled sandwich encapsulates much that is bad about British food. The fundamental concept is flawed because, as any baker can tell you, bread should never be refrigerated. Refrigeration kills any possibility of a proper contrast between crust and crumb because of the prevailing cold and dampness it causes. The best sandwich is the sort that any small shop can whizz up: fresh bread and rolls, straight from a local baker that morning, filled on the spot and sold hours later for more or less instant consumption – a straightforward, simple, sustainable process capable of delivering an end product worth eating. Large food retailers’ centralised systems, however, like sandwiches to be made by a few dedicated sandwich factories, the sort that also sell to petrol station forecourts and mass catering outfits. In 2000, one pre-packed sandwich company supplied almost a quarter of all the sandwiches sold by UK multiple retailers. You may have noticed how many sandwiches seem somewhat similar even when you buy them in different supermarket chains. This concentration of production in a few prolific companies is part of the explanation.
From these dedicated factories, sandwiches are delivered to a regional distribution centre and from there to stores. To satisfy the inevitable hygiene implications generated by this extended process and to survive distribution, they have to be chilled to a glacial temperature. Only certain types of technobread are suitable for this treatment: