Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. Joanna Blythman
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in Elizabeth David’s boeuf bourguignon (from French Provincial Cooking):
Beef, salt pork or unsalted streaky bacon, onion, thyme, parsley and bay leaves, red wine, olive oil, meat stock, garlic, flour, mushrooms and meat dripping.
Ingredients in a supermarket’s ‘better-than-the-rest’ boeuf bourguignon casserole:
Beef, water, red wine, baby onion, bacon lardons (pork belly; water; salt; dried glucose syrup; stabilisers; sodium polyphosphate, sodium triphosphate, disodium diphosphate; preservative; sodium nitrite; antioxidant; sodium ascorbate; smoke flavouring), onion, modified maize starch, beef stock (concentrated beef broth; yeast extract; glucose; salt; vegetable fat; water, emulsifier; mono-and di-glycerides of fatty acids; rosemary extract), celery, carrot, vegetable stock (with emulsifier: mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids), vegetable oil, white wine vinegar, salt, pork gelatine, thyme, dried glucose syrup, garlic purée, acidity regulators (sodium acetate; sodium citrate), ground bay, antioxidant (sodium ascorbate).
Even allowing for the additional information for manufactured food required under labelling regulations, such a comparison underlined how a supermarket ready meal in a box was a very different animal from its home-cooked equivalent. An advert for Tesco’s Finest range said, ‘It’s like a top chef preparing dinner for you at a moment’s notice.’ Tesco had put together a team of ‘250 of the best of them [chefs]’ to create, amongst other Finest lines, convenience meals using ‘specially sourced ingredients’. But how many top chefs use ingredients such as dried glucose syrup, mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids or acidity regulator?
Having successfully planted the idea that there is no need to cook because factory food is at least as good, if not better, than the home-made equivalent, supermarkets have sought to extend their gastronomic empire by fostering the idea that there is no need to eat out in restaurants either.
Here the most daring stunt has been performed by Sainsbury’s with its Bombay Brasserie meal kits, named after the celebrated London restaurant. Launching an extended range, Sir Gulam Noon of Noon Products, who makes the range for Sainsbury’s, hailed it as a way for Sainsbury’s shoppers who live outside London to ‘create their own Bombay Brasserie at home’. He said that his company had worked very closely with the restaurant’s chefs ‘to ensure all the dishes were produced to restaurant standards’, encouraging us to believe the implausible proposition that when we reheat a factory curry meal at home it will look and taste the same as one freshly prepared on the spot by top Indian chefs in one of the UK’s foremost restaurants. Only the most gullible would believe that, of course, but such counter-intuitive claims have the effect of making the product being hyped sound better than those that preceded it, so rekindling our interest when it might otherwise wane. Which is exactly what they are intended to do.
If you habitually shop in one supermarket chain for ready meals, you might occasionally wonder if you are missing out on variety by not trying out rival chains’ offerings. Don’t. There’s a very, very strong chance that despite being sold by different chains, the contents of those boxes will resemble one another closely.
Carry out a ‘tried and tasted’ comparison – a popular consumer journalism exercise which attempts to compare the relative contents of various supermarket chains’ boxed offerings – and the resemblance between the appealingly packaged ready meals that line our supermarket shelves is striking. In 2003, Asian food expert Ken Hom carried out precisely such a test on supermarket Thai green curry, sampling those sold by Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Somerfield and Marks & Spencer. The parameters of tried-and-tested features are often skewed towards supermarkets – a reflection of their grip on the nation’s psyche: usually only supermarket samples are tested, and no restaurant or home-made samples are included in the comparison. Such features demand that there must be winners and losers. An internal hierarchy must be established, even if the entire category is lacking in merit. But the results in this particular taste test were more candid than usual. They spoke volumes about the homogeneity of supermarket food. The same taste criticisms came up with monotony: dry chicken, not spicy, overly sweet, not at all authentic. Though the inevitable ratings implied that one chain’s offering had some slight merit over another’s, Mr Hom sounded distinctly underwhelmed. One tasted ‘more like an airline meal’; another was ‘not green curry as I know it’. The highest score went to ‘the best of the bunch’. One sensed that given a free hand, he might have been happier offering a Eurovision Song Contest ‘nul points’ to the whole lot.
The fact that one chain’s Thai green curry tastes pretty much like all the others – and not at all like any green curry you’d ever encounter in Thailand – is scarcely surprising. There’s a good chance that it was made by the same company that is supplying its rivals. Between 1995 and 2000, for example, Hazlewood Foods was a major chilled meals supplier to Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose and Morrisons; S&A to Tesco, Safeway and Asda; Northern Foods to Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Tesco; Geest to Sainsbury’s and Tesco; and Noon to Sainsbury’s and Waitrose. Another company, Uniq, has worked with various chains developing their low-fat, healthy-eating product ranges such as Marks & Spencer’s Count On Us, Sainsbury’s Be Good To Yourself, Safeway’s Eat Smart and Asda’s Good For You ranges.
Of course one cannot automatically assume, because of this clubby overlap, that supermarkets can’t instruct their faithful suppliers to introduce a genuine ‘point of difference’ to distinguish their chain’s offering from all the others. Recipes may differ, ingredients may come from distinct sources and so on. But taste your way around a few supermarket chilled meals and you will begin to notice how the white sauce in one chain’s cod and parsley pie is surprisingly like another chain’s moussaka topping, how the tomato goo on top of your pizza tastes oddly reminiscent of the Mediterranean-style pasta in tomato and basil sauce, how the Mexican salsa tastes like the Spanish gazpacho and how, if you sampled the sauce on those Malaysian sweet chilli prawns blind, you might easily confuse it with the gravy on the lamb steak with redcurrants.
Think about it a little longer and you’ll pick up the same defining characteristics in almost all savoury supermarket-prepared meals. Any meat will probably be overcooked and dry – a consequence of bulk factory cooking followed by domestic reheating. A salty savouriness without any particular flavour profile prevails. Where a sauce or a liquid element is present, a gloopy consistency is de rigueur. Last but not least, don’t be surprised it looks little like the picture on the box. That enticing image, after all, is the product of long hours of toil put in by a team of food stylists, lighting managers and photographers.
Clearly, when so much food is made for our supermarkets by the same companies, the results are likely to resemble one another. The same state-of-the-art factory line technologies and automated short cuts are used to turn out any mass-produced food object. Any slight personality to be found in the ingredients used is beaten out of them by the time they have been subjected to the various interventions of large-scale food processing. Hence the institutionalised sameness of supermarket ready meals.
Lest consumers begin to tire of this uniformity, supermarkets go in for what is known as ‘sub-branding’ or ‘segmentation’. When their shoppers begin to feel like children at Christmas, rather jaded with that new toy, supermarkets like to feed us a stream of novelties that appear to refresh the category even though they are essentially variations of the same thing. It’s just like Barbie, the doll with the abundant hair, pert breasts, long legs and impossibly narrow hips. There is Beach Barbie, Air Hostess Barbie, Aerobic Barbie and so on but she always has the same essential hair, breasts, legs and hips. Supermarket ready meals are the food equivalent: they might as well be Thai Barbie, Bistro Barbie, Café Society Barbie, Vegetarian Barbie or Indian Takeaway Barbie. They look superficially different but the underlying