Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. Joanna Blythman
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Barbie, still look good when they come out of their packaging. They look like what they are, a disappointingly slight, unappetising-looking pile of overcooked food in a plastic tray.
Any positive selling point or new-sounding concept can, in supermarket-speak, be ‘rolled out’ into stores to create a new range. Better-than-the-rest ranges (such as Tesco Finest or Asda’s Extra Special, Somerfield’s So Good, Co-op’s Truly Irresistible), Ready-To-Cook, Meals in Minutes, lines that promote healthy eating or cater for special dietary needs like Sainsbury’s Wellbeing or Safeway’s Eat Smart, a celebrity chef collection perhaps, a ‘value’ range are all concepts that allow the creation of whole new family groups or tiers of products, as desirable and collectable to trusting consumers as Pokemon cards and football stickers. These ranges boost the own-brand power of the chain by increasing the number of ‘facings’ with which shelves can be filled, preventing ennui from setting in and customers from drifting elsewhere.
Just as we are beginning to notice that our supermarket’s chicken korma, for example, is expensive for what it is, not to mention pretty dull, the chain will relaunch it in a new, exciting Regional Indian format, only tweaking the product itself but radically altering its appearance and the marketing pitch on the box. These supermarket strategies encourage us to see diversity and qualitative difference where in fact there is pitifully little. With only minor adjustments, factory spaghetti bolognese can be reinvented as spicy Manhattan meatballs with spaghetti. A change of packaging and hey presto, chilli con carne becomes a chilli beef bowl. A few standard dishes, minimally altered then packed in a brown craft paper takeaway bag, can become a restaurant ‘Chinese banquet’. Unable or unwilling to give us the true variety that comes from using a large number of suppliers with geographically distinctive, often seasonal foods, produced with specialist expertise, supermarkets offer instead the phoney choice of the merchandised factory meal in its seemingly infinite chameleon-like forms.
Sainsbury’s summed up UK supermarket chains’ claims to broaden the British palate when it said that it could supply ‘everything you need to launch you on a round-the-world voyage of culinary discovery’. This thinking produces some very bizarre products: Sainsbury’s ‘American style mini battered chicken fillets with a honey and mustard sauce’, for example. These look and taste indistinguishable from any number of other battered chicken products on supermarket shelves. It is not at all clear what is American about them. Their label, though, says ‘Produced in Thailand … This product has been previously frozen and defrosted under controlled conditions making it suitable for refreezing.’ So there you have it, an unremarkable bit of battered chicken reared and manufactured in Asia (where chicken is produced for less than the UK) to a nominally American recipe, which is then sent frozen from the other side of the world to be defrosted in the UK so you can refreeze it at home. Is this a globetrotting foodie adventure worth having?
With such creations, far from broadening the UK’s palate, supermarkets have conditioned it to accept traducements of the real thing. Italian chef and food expert Antonio Carluccio has been outspoken about their contribution to Britain’s food education. ‘Supermarkets have committed huge crimes when it comes to Italian food. It’s everyone’s dream to supply Tesco or Sainsbury, but I would say to many small suppliers, don’t bother. The supermarkets here have such a large share of the market that you have to be able to supply large volumes and quality is compromised. I was once invited by a major food supplier to multiples to improve the own-label lasagne. But when they went back to the supermarkets they weren’t interested because it was 10 pence dearer.’
Supermarket convenience foods flirt with foreignness, exoticism and authenticity, but their taste remains essentially conservative, upholding the salty-sweet, gloopy status quo of industrial food production. As Safeway’s buying manager for prepared foods put it, ‘Authenticity is not necessarily what people want, so we try to marry authenticity with the British palate.’ The truth is that supermarket prepared food can’t be made to taste like a good example of the real thing, and so supermarkets must feed a dumbed-down version to the consumers with a positive spin put on it. They have done so with notable success. British consumers, for example, spend £7,000 a minute on ready meals, three times more than any other country in Europe. Spending on these is set to soar to £5 billion per year by 2007. Cultural commentator Jonathan Meades once said that supermarkets have thrived on what he calls ‘the British indifference to flavour, freshness and quality, the British preoccupation with the appearance of foodstuffs, the British insistence on choice’. How right he was.
Hardly a week goes by without another reminder that British eating habits are in decline: a survey, or new research, providing more evidence to confirm that we seem to have become a culinarily clueless country, simultaneously overfed yet undernourished, intent on fattening ourselves up on junk in preparation for an early grave. The 2001–2002 government Expenditure and Food Survey was one such reminder. In a nutshell, this snapshot of national eating habits showed that consumption of fresh, raw, unprocessed food had declined within a year, for example fish (−4 per cent) and green vegetables (−7 per cent), while that of processed food was up, chips for instance +6 per cent and processed meats +3.5 per cent.
When consumers are making a beeline for reheatable baked potato instead of baking a fresh one themselves, or selecting a plastic carton filled with mass-produced cauliflower cheese for two instead of a fresh cauliflower, milk and cheese, is this just more confirmation that the UK is, as cultural commentator Jonathan Meades has suggested, ‘a country with a collectively defective palate’, or does it have something to do with the way we shop?
It could simply be coincidence that the UK’s vegetable consumption, for example, has declined by almost a third since the 1960s, just as the supermarkets’ retail dominance has grown. Supermarkets would doubtless tell us that this dramatic decline has nothing to do with them. When such worrying trends in UK food consumption surface, our large retailers, even though they supply the bulk of the nation’s shopping basket, are always prominent in the rush to distance themselves from any culpability, presenting themselves instead as the purveyors of solutions. After all, supermarkets regularly take credit for giving consumers a wider, more enticing range of vegetables than ever before. Who, they boast, had ever heard of mangetouts or baby corn before the supermarkets came on the scene?
In fact supermarkets positively fall over each other in the stampede to tell us how they are doing their bit to improve the nation’s diet. If we are turning into a nation of hypertensive fatties, it is nothing whatsoever to do with what they sell. Their public relations departments issue upbeat and paternalistic press releases telling us how they are filling their shelves with prominently labelled healthy-eating options, helpfully marketing small fruits in child-friendly packaging and so on. They like to be seen as crusaders for top-quality, fresh, healthy food for everyone. In January 2003, for example, Asda claimed that it had taken 1,000 tonnes of salt out of its own-label food products in the preceding four years and pledged to take a further 10 per cent out by the end of 2004. Somewhat embarrassingly, six months later, Asda was indirectly criticised by the Food Standards Agency for loading some of its healthy eating lines with salt. An Asda Good For You lasagne contained 60 per cent of the recommended daily salt intake for an adult. Asda’s ‘Good For You’ korma with rice contained 55 per cent. Popular Asda own-label children’s meals – spaghetti with meatballs, shepherd’s pie and macaroni cheese – contained 48 per cent, 46 per cent and 42 per cent respectively of a child’s recommended intake. If this was an improvement, how much salt had they contained in previous years?
Usually there are strings attached to supermarkets’ championing of public health. Often their healthy-eating initiatives are little more than unsubtly disguised self-promotion exercises with a commercial pay-off. In 2003, for