Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. Joanna Blythman
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apples on sale in major supermarkets were imported. When it carried out the same survey for the 2003 harvest, it found that matters were even worse. The average proportion of UK-grown apples sold in Tesco and Asda stores was 38 per cent. I asked fruit growers why UK fruit was so poorly represented. ‘supermarkets can’t be hassled with UK fruit, 300 boxes here, 400 boxes there. They can’t even be bothered switching on the computer for that,’ one grower told me. ‘Even companies with turn-overs of £2–3 million are seen as too small to bother with. Supermarkets just want to deal with multinational conglomerates,’ said another.
Herbs are another striking example of supermarkets’ preference for doing business with major players – even if they are thousands of miles away. Almost all the herbs on sale in UK supermarkets come from Israel where big horticultural companies can guarantee a year-round supply. Yet several popular culinary herbs such as thyme, rosemary and bay grow all year round in the UK. Others such as chives, sage, mint, rocket and parsley will grow in the UK for a good six months of the year. It is really only the most tender, sun-seeking herbs like basil and coriander that are problematic for our climate. If supermarkets were committed to supporting British production, they could sell British herbs when available and supplement them with ones from abroad only as necessary. When the UK supply is limited, there are many European countries that produce fine herbs. Cyprus, for example, produces a steady flow of top-class parsley and coriander, while Italy has fields of pungent basil throughout the milder months. But it is administratively much easier for our big food retailers to strike a deal with an Israeli consortium for a 365-days-a-year supply.
The sorry state of many less robust supermarket vegetables is an obvious consequence of supermarkets’ preparedness to defy local, even European, seasons and source globally at the drop of a hat. Once unwrapped at home, and no longer under flattering produce lighting, these items are likely to resemble airport-weary, jet-lagged travellers. Much supermarket produce never tastes of anything much because it has been harvested prematurely to stop it deteriorating during transportation and on the shelf. Although the big chains all like to make great play of their sophisticated cold chains which theoretically permit all kinds of fragile produce to be transported thousands of miles yet taste as good as when it was picked, the fact is that however much our supermarkets might wish it, fresh produce simply doesn’t travel well. No surprise then that consumers are encouraged by supermarkets to shop with the eyes only, all other senses suspended. Smells that might inform the foreign shopper about ripeness, in melons or peaches say, are outlawed. They don’t fit in with ‘aroma management’, the aim of which is to have a uniform smell throughout the store, save for the come-on smells of the instore bakery. Indeed aromas raise a dangerous spectre whose existence UK supermarkets deny: of seasonality, living material in a constant state of flux, development and decay.
One strawberry grower explained to me that he routinely picked strawberries destined for supermarkets one or two days earlier than those that would be sold in his farm shop. They were less red, less ripe and less sweet to start with, he said, and supermarket chilling methods would not improve them any further. But that’s how the supermarkets liked them. Another strawberry grower gave me this vivid illustration of how supermarket distribution methods actually get in the way of freshness and flavour:
When we used to sell our strawberries through wholesale markets they were much fresher. We’d pick all day Friday, for example, a lorry would collect them at 7 p.m. and they’d be in Covent Garden by 9.30 p.m. From there they’d be delivered overnight to secondary wholesale markets all over the UK and they’d be on sale in greengrocers the next morning. Now the supermarkets insist on a 10.30 a.m. pick-up which means that berries picked on a Friday have to be put in cold store overnight. They won’t usually get to the central receiving depot until later on Saturday afternoon where they need to be re-apportioned to all the stores and sent out again, probably on the Sunday. The supermarkets have actually lengthened the time between picking and consumption.
Or, as one Lewisham stallholder put it rather more bluntly to a reporter from Virgin.net: ‘The gear on my stall came from Covent Garden at five this morning. It was almost certainly in the ground yesterday morning. We don’t need cold rooms like supermarkets do, we sell the stuff the same day or sling it. Do supermarkets get their stuff delivered fresh from the market every morning and replace it after hours? Like fuck they do.’
One ex-supermarket supplier told me that he sincerely believed that many younger people who only shop in supermarkets have never seen true freshness.
The supermarkets say that their spinach is cut, bagged, labelled, sent cooled to a regional distribution centre then to the store, all within twenty-four hours. That’s the theory. In practice, you wait for an unpredictable-sized order to arrive at 10 a.m. You can’t afford to let the supermarket down so you keep a least a day’s supply in cold store just in case the order is bigger than you estimated it would be, so instantly adding twenty-four hours’ life. For a Monday order, you harvest on a Friday. The packhouse will probably bag it on the Tuesday. Spinach can be at least five days old by the time it’s on the shelf and then it will have a further three days ‘use by’ date on it.
Premature picking and over-refrigeration are not the only devices supermarkets employ to create the impression of true freshness, while simultaneously stretching shelf life to its limits. Selecting out certain problematic lines is another. Leeks, for example, are now routinely sold ‘de-flagged’, without their green stalks. The supermarket justification for this is that shoppers don’t have the time or inclination for green flags any longer because they might contain some soil and need to be cleaned. The real reason is that if you leave them on, your leeks look older and sadder more quickly. So it is better for our supermarkets just to whack the flags off and present the de-flagging as a helping hand towards convenience and easing the pressure of modern life. Add to that the advantage that the leeks can be made to fill exactly the shelf space allocated to them. Whole celery is becoming harder to buy. Supermarkets would really prefer to have growers dump the outer stalks and just sell packs of heads because they have a longer shelf life. If they were to sell large-leaf British spinach loose, it would need to be sold in one or two days if it was not to look past its best. So supermarkets have simply stopped stocking large leaf spinach, replacing it with infinitely more expensive baby-leaf spinach, often sold in pillow packs so as to artificially extend its shelf life. As any cook can tell you, the typical supermarket 20 gram pack of herbs is pretty useless. What cooks need is decent-sized bunches. But if you sell herbs in a sparkly stiff plastic carton, most of which is covered by a label, even tired and flaccid herbs can be given the illusion of freshness. Minimally wrapped fresh herb bunches, on the other hand, give a more accurate indication of their age.
To sell really fresh leafy vegetables or herbs successfully, you need experienced greengrocers actively working to achieve a good turnaround. But such expertise is scarce in supermarkets. Store managers simply accept consignments of commodities pre-groomed to reduce all possible risk of spoilage. This skills-and-experience deficit extends to part-time shelf-stackers who are not expected to know whether a Jersey Royal is a potato, a breed of cow or a Channel Island monarch. Further up the horticultural buying chain, there is also a vacuum where experience should be. An importer of Italian salads told me of his experience visiting one of the large supermarkets with samples. ‘I met their boss man for fresh produce. He said he was looking to source something a bit different and I showed him a head of trevisse [a red chicory, common in Italy, similar to radicchio but naturally pointed in shape]. ‘‘Obviously they must grow these in tubes to get them to grow into this shape,’’ he said. He was so ignorant, I couldn’t be bothered answering him.’ An English fruit grower told me how one supermarket chain rejected a pre-agreed consignment of Worcester Pearmain apples because they were not round enough. ‘The quality controller didn’t know that this variety of apple is naturally a bit pear-shaped – hence the name. Help, we thought. They don’t know this but they are dealing with our produce!’
The only relief from the standardised tedium of supermarket produce comes in the form of speciality ranges of fruit and vegetables that appear to have more going for them. Complaints about pink sludge supermarket tomatoes, aptly named ‘Wasser-bomben’ in Germany, prompted the introduction of ‘flavour-grown’ varieties.