Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. Joanna Blythman

By the Same Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       Supermarket starters

      Leafing through this book you might get the impression that it is written by a longstanding opponent and critic of supermarkets. It might surprise you to know that actually there was a time when I pushed my trolley around the supermarket just like the next person. In common with most food shoppers, I believed that supermarkets offered a welcome addition to traditional shopping outlets – butchers, fishmongers, grocers and so on – expanding the all-round food shopping choice. I thought, naively, that supermarkets were an ‘as well as’ not ‘instead of’ feature of the retail scene.

      Then in 1992 I moved to Strasbourg in France. There I shopped like a typical French person. I used small shops and food markets routinely, making a trip out of town about once a month to stock up at the hypermarket on boring items such as cat food and dishwasher salt. Naturally, when I was there, I cherry-picked any attractive special offers. But I soon learnt that to a French person – or any other European for that matter – the British idea of buying everything you need in a once-a-week supermarket shopping blitz was alien, bizarre even. The French are quite clear that although supermarkets are handy for standard items, the best food is on sale elsewhere.

      Returning to the UK in 1995, I found that I was bridling at the prospect of readjusting to the prevailing supermarket-shopping pattern. Indeed, I saw it with new eyes. Several useful independent local shops had closed down in the time I had been away and just up the road, where there used to be playing fields for schoolchildren, the dreariest of Tescos had sprung up. There it was, big, ugly and floodlit twenty-four hours a day, squatting behind a brash new roundabout in a sea of new roads and concrete parking spaces. Still, it was close and convenient (or so I thought), the obvious place to head for when the milk and toilet rolls ran out.

      So I used it anyway, but it was only a matter of months before I realised that shopping there was stultifying any creative urge I had to cook because I simply couldn’t find the sort of food I want to eat and feed to my family. In exasperation I started driving further to other supermarket chains, but I found myself having the same reaction. The penny dropped that what I was looking for was fresh, local, seasonal ingredients produced by a large number of small, diverse producers. What supermarkets excel at, on the other hand, is over-packaged, often over-processed, much-travelled ingredients that put two fingers up to the seasons and any notion of locality or geographical specificity.

      I began to see what a spirit-crushing and alienating experience supermarket shopping actually was. How in UK chains, any given day of the year is just like every other day. How the experience of shopping in Salford is exactly like shopping in Southampton, Sheffield or Stirling. I realised that supermarket shopping was turning me into a robotic Stepford wife – minus the fixed smile. I bought the same repeat items and gritted my teeth as I made my way round the aisles on autopilot. I spent a fortune every time. My cupboards and fridge were constantly stuffed with food and yet somehow I could never think of anything to cook.

      Slowly but surely I became deeply discontented with the quality of food that was on offer. I wasn’t interested in ‘Buy One Get One Free’ offers on fizzy drinks and multi-packs of flavoured crisps, which seemed to be something of a supermarket speciality. I didn’t buy much processed food and always bypassed the sprawling shelves loaded up with ready meals. I was looking for fresh, unprocessed food ingredients and I came to see that in this department UK supermarkets just didn’t deliver. Ripe fruit? That’s too much hassle for them so forget it. Properly hung meat? That takes too long and cuts profit margins, so forget that too. Decent bread without chemically hardened fats or GM enzymes? Nicely ripened cheese? Dream on. A chicken that has not stood in excrement in an overcrowded broiler shed? ‘Well, we only get two boxes of free-range/organic chicken once a week and we’ve run out and even then it’s only whole birds not chicken pieces …’ Why? ‘Because there’s not enough demand for it.’

      Eventually, I got fed up with being marginalised as a cranky customer with odd and unrepresentative eating habits. My patience ran out, and on 1 January 2002, I made a New Year resolution to support the independent food sector and stop shopping routinely in supermarkets. I started revisiting independent butchers, fishmongers, cheesemongers and greengrocers with increasing relish. I rediscovered vigorous coriander in fist-sized bunches, not a few limp and olive-coloured stalks in shiny plastic. My fish was lustrous and had a sparkle in its eye, unlike the matt, flaccid specimens on the supermarket slab. I was nudged into remembering how good beef was reddish-brown, marbled with creamy fat and tender, not bright red, lean and tough. I signed up for an organic vegetable box and really looked forward to Thursdays when it was delivered to my door, just for the sheer pleasure of seeing what was different and seasonal that week. Fortnightly farmers’ markets became an unmissable event on Saturday mornings. I got to know the shopkeepers, stallholders and delivery men, and came to value my interaction with them. It’s hard to build a relationship with a low-paid, mind-numbed checkout operator or a harassed shelf-stacker. Gradually, supermarkets became a residual shopping possibility for me, generally when I had completely run out of uninteresting and heavy items.

      In no time at all it was as if a horrible black burden had been lifted off my shoulders. The day-in, day-out struggle to feed everyone seemed to abate. My urge to cook and my gastronomic creativity soared. The contents of my rubbish bin shrank as it no longer had to accommodate excessive quantities of unnecessary and unsustainable supermarket packaging. An unforeseen bonus was that far from spending more money, I was spending less. This was chiefly because the independents’ prices were lower: supermarkets are surprisingly expensive places to shop for fresh, unprocessed meat, fish, fruit and vegetables. But it was also because I wasn’t routinely over-buying and being snared into stocking up with products I did not need and probably would never get around to eating. In fact, we were spending less money on food but eating better and more healthily than before.

      Then I got the idea of writing a book about supermarkets. I wanted to investigate why they were so incapable of supplying the kind of food that I, and a growing number of people, want to eat. I began to see how we consumers had unwittingly relinquished sovereignty over what we eat to a handful of large corporations that now control 80 per cent of the UK’s shopping spend.

      In effect, our shopping choices are now dictated by a few monopolistic retailers who, by wooing consumers with apparently low prices and lobbying subsequent governments not to interfere with their divine right to make money, have been allowed to develop an unhealthy grip over the nation’s shopping basket. At the beginning of 2007, Tesco ate up almost 32 per cent of the UK’s spend, giving it a scary degree of purchasing power over suppliers and considerable scope to redesign what we eat to suit its own objectives.

      Let’s be clear that large supermarket chains are companies whose aim is not, first and foremost, to meet society’s interests. They aren’t too concerned about being excellent grocers, or supplying the nation with good-quality, wholesome food, or supporting British farmers or treating Third World workers ethically or being kind to turkeys or helping working mothers to feed their children better – or any other goal of which many of us would approve. The leading supermarket chains are all making great play of how ‘green’ they are. Tesco says that it is going to publish the carbon footprint of each of its products while Sainsbury’s, Asda and Waitrose have all pledged to reduce waste, amongst other measures. Some supermarket green claims sound better than they really are. Tesco has introduced degradable bags, but they are still made from plastic. These ‘degradable’ bags need sunlight in order to break down, and the majority will probably end up in landfill sites where they are more likely to break down into methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

      UK supermarkets are definitely making efforts to green up their act, but when the National Consumer Council examined their performance in 2006 – looking at food transport, waste, sustainable sourcing