Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. Joanna Blythman

Now the concept has been extended to all manner of produce. Tesco’s Finest and Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference labels feature items such as sun-ripened Jamaican ortaniques, extra-sweet golden kiwis, Delizia tomatoes ‘grown in sandy soil to deliver this distinct, sweet flavour’ and bananas ‘left to ripen longer and grown exclusively on the tropical terraces of the Canaries’. In 2003 Waitrose launched a new fruit range packed in black and gold livery explicitly called ‘Perfectly Ripe’, consisting of up-market pears, stone fruit and tropical fruits such as mango and papaya that have been left to mature on the tree. These supermarket specialities cost substantially more than the standard equivalent and seek to make a virtue out of giving consumers what we always hoped we’d be getting anyway: ripe, fresh produce that actually tastes of something.

       12 Lost at sea

      We are told by the government that we ought to be eating two portions of fish a week, but you can bet that very few supermarket shoppers manage that. When you are buying fish there are two important criteria that ought to be fulfilled. The paramount consideration is that the fish must be ultra-fresh. The secondary consideration is that the wider the changing daily selection of different species – ‘the catch of the day’ – the better. supermarkets toil to deliver on both fronts. Take processed products like smoked salmon or marinated herring out of the equation – these pad out the supermarket’s fish offering – and you’ll see just how little fresh, unprocessed fish is actually on offer. Any-one still lucky enough to have the comparative benchmark of a good independent fishmonger in their area cannot fail to be underwhelmed by the unexciting and lacklustre nature of the typical supermarket offering. Yet as fish expert William Black tactfully put it: ‘It’s to supermarkets that many of us have to turn, not always happily, for our regular supplies of fish.’ It is no surprise that the UK’s fish consumption is going down. The government’s 2001–2002 Expenditure and Food Survey showed that sales of fish had declined by 4 per cent within the year.

      In smaller stores, the whole fish category is generally relegated to a blink-and-you’d-miss-it zone of shelf space. You’ll find fish in pre-packs sealed with ‘modified atmosphere’ (air that’s had its composition altered to artificially extend the shelf life of the product within it), under film so tough and so tight that until you get home and pierce it with a sharp knife you won’t have a clue whether the fish is, to your mind, fresh or not. Don’t have high expectations. Fresh fish goes through a dumb period when it is not actively ‘off’ or malodorous but not exactly full of the joys of the sea either. Fish in that state is what we are likely to get when we buy supermarket pre-packs. You’re likely to have the further frustration of being locked into the retailer’s idea of the typical ‘meal occasion’. Salmon steaks, for example, commonly come in packs of two, designed for the supermarket’s idea of a cosy dîner à deux. So what do you do if there are three or five people for dinner, or you live alone? Feed the surplus one to the cat?

      In bigger supermarkets with a distinct wet fish counter where fresh fish is laid out on the slab, there ought to be more flexibility. In supermarket terms this is a specialist department, so it seems reasonable to expect that the variety might be less predictable, depending on what’s available on the market and what species are in season. But here again, our supermarkets seem incapable of delivering those two crucial criteria, freshness and range. As the UK’s leading seafood chef and authority of fish Rick Stein put it, ‘It’s a pity some chains are still taking fish from the quayside to the multiple depot and then into the store. And it’s ridiculous when you read that some produce has travelled 1,000 miles to the shop … I believe the quality and range of supermarket fish counters still needs a lot of work. I find some of them boring, given the predominance of farmed salmon.’

      Take a couple of minutes to appraise the typical supermarket wet fish counter and you’ll see what he means. The first thing that hits you is a preponderance of farmed (salmon, trout), as opposed to wild fish. Increasingly, even species we presume are wild – like cod, halibut, turbot, tuna, bass and bream – are being farmed. Supermarkets say that farmed fish is just a response to shortage of wild stocks, but that is a partial truth. Supermarkets like farmed fish because it can be bought and sold like ball bearings. It is immune to the whims of the sea and so it fits in with supermarkets’ centralised, highly automated, nationwide buying systems. It takes only a couple of conversations between a supermarket fish buyer and Scottish farmed salmon supplier, or a Greek sea bass farmer, to arrange a supply of fish of a standard weight in all stores, at a low price that can be guaranteed for a substantial period of time. By contrast, fleeting, ever-changing supplies of wild fish are a pain in the backside for supermarkets. The catch changes each day; prices and availability fluctuate. Supplies of fresh wild fish are inherently local, patchy and highly changeable. Supermarkets’ buying requirements, on the other hand, are national and fixed.

      Supermarkets have trialled schemes supplying locally caught fish bypassing central distribution. In 2003, Safeway found that such an initiative in the south-west of England raised sales by 27 per cent. But this method of supply is not typical. Usually, fish and shellfish must pass through one of a few regional distribution centres (RDCs) irrespective of where the fish is to be sold. This is the opposite of the old fishmonger’s goal of ‘From the sea to the pan as fast as we can’. In the classic supermarket system, haddock landed and smoked at Peterhead in the far north-east of Scotland may well be sent to a distribution centre in England before being despatched to Scottish stores. Whereas traditional fishmongers bought from merchants operating out of local ports and sold what they got as soon as possible, supermarkets routinely transport fish up and down the country. In this way, they have lengthened the time that fish takes to arrive on the slab, not shortened it. And for supermarkets to be interested in doing business with a particular supplier of wild fish, that supplier must be able to guarantee a large enough volume to supply all, or at least a large number, of stores. So the supplier may need to buy in fish from other geographically distant sources to meet the supermarket’s requirements.

      A common characteristic of supermarket wet fish counters is that a large proportion of fish has been defrosted from frozen. Most consumers assume, not unreasonably, that because fish and shellfish are lying on the slab, not in a deep freeze, they are fresh. Read the small text on the label – it may not be obvious unless you look quite carefully – and you’ll see the words ‘previously frozen’. Though arguments rage about the effect that freezing has on fish, gastronomic experts agree that frozen is a poor second best to fresh. By buying frozen fish, supermarkets get to have their cake and eat it. They have the ease of buying and transporting fish frozen, without any of the hassle or expense necessarily involved in handling a sensitive product like chilled fresh fish which, to be sold at its best, needs as short and direct a supply chain as possible. Meanwhile, the less than vigilant shopper, who fails to notice the ‘previously frozen’ small print and refreezes the fish at home, is guaranteed a doubly disappointing, and possibly microbiologically dodgy, eating experience.

      Padding out of the fish counter comes in the form of the growing number of ‘exotic’ species such as tilapia, hoki and marlin which sell, somewhat cheekily, under the label ‘air freighted for freshness’, though anyone with an experienced eye for fish could tell you that they look exceptionally matt and flaccid, having lost their sparkle after their long journey from oceans on the other side of the world. Now 70 per cent of fish consumed in the UK originates in foreign waters, a figure that clearly reflects our supermarkets’ sourcing policies.

      Check out your supermarket’s wet fish counter of an afternoon, and you can bet on finding ‘special offer’ bargain fish that’s been marked down for quick sale. Whether it’s cod or skate or swordfish or tuna, after one look at its tired and lustreless state, you’ll instantly appreciate why the staff behind the counter might be having problems shifting it. ‘When I walk into a supermarket with a fish counter I can just tell by the smell alone that the fish is not fresh by my standards and the look only confirms that,’ one experienced fishmonger told me. He explained that when it comes to supplies of wild fish