Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets

The supermarkets are happy to bask in their role as the new civic developers as long as they get their pound of retail flesh. But the price for planners and their communities is that they may have to say yes to a new store when they would otherwise prefer to say no. Where once people strolled in the park, or walked around the local duck pond, a day out in our supermarket-saturated country is beginning to mean a visit to a shopping and leisure centre of which a supermarket is an integral part. Naturally, supermarket chains are keen to promote their stores as places in which to while away leisure time. Under the headline ‘Everyone Asda have a hobby’ (#litres_trial_promo), the freesheet Metro told the story of septuagenarian Richard Bunn who, after enjoying a bargain all-day breakfast at his local store in Weston-Super-Mare, had made his hobby visiting Asda stores. When he had travelled some 100,000 miles to visit all its stores in Britain, Asda grasped the public relations opportunity and asked Mr Bunn to open a new store in Oldbury in the West Midlands. ‘I know people think I’m batty but I love Asda and once I decided to visit every store, I became a man with a mission,’ Mr Bunn told assembled press.

If an obdurate local authority says no to a supermarket development, even if it is cloaked in a halo of urban revitalisation, supermarkets have further avenues to pursue. The original foot-in-the-door tactic was to construct smaller stores – which are more likely to get planning permission – that just happened to have ridiculously large numbers of parking places. This built in a generous margin of surplus land for future extensions. A few years later, the chain could apply to extend the original store into the car park. Little by little, the chain could realise its greater plan. Nowadays the buzz words are ‘space sweating’. Chains ‘sweat assets’ by building mezzanine floors in existing stores where they would not be allowed to extend externally. UK planning law excludes internal building work from the definition of development requiring planning permission. In 2003, Asda Wal-Mart announced its intention to build mezzanine floors in up to forty stores in what Dow Jones International News reported as ‘a way of increasing space amid strict planning laws’. After a successful mezzanine was slotted into its York store, Asda Wal-Mart set about building floors in stores in Sheffield, and Cumbernauld and Govan in Glasgow. In the Sheffield Asda, the mezzanine added 33,000 square feet to the store – almost the same sales area as the largest supermarket now permitted in Ireland. Friends of the Earth blew the whistle. ‘Asda Wal-Mart is making a mockery of planning guidance. By installing mezzanines in existing stores, the company does not even have to submit a planning application to the local authority. This leaves the local authority powerless to assess the impact on local shops or traffic levels and local communities have no say in the development,’ it pointed out. Sheffield MP Clive Betts told the House of Commons that the mezzanine expansion in his constituency had made existing traffic problems worse. ‘Traffic is considerably heavier, yet there has been no analysis or plan to deal with it, because there has been no requirement for the store to sit down with the highways authority and the planning authority to work out these problems, because there is no need for planning permission.’

Yet another approach is to include housing in proposals for extensions to existing stores. Sainsbury’s, for example, got the go-ahead to extend its Richmond store from an already substantial 55,000 square feet to 63,500 square feet largely because it would build 179 flats on top of the existing store and the extension.

Our supermarket chains are determined to get planning permission for new stores and extensions to existing ones. And despite the fact that theoretically they now operate in a tricky planning climate, it is amazing how often they get what they want. As Tesco’s finance director told the Daily Telegraph, ‘Planning approvals have not stopped. (#litres_trial_promo) It’s just more difficult than it used to be. Out of town is very difficult to get but you are seeing brownfield sites redeveloped. Planning changes have not killed development. They have acted to redirect it.’

6 Pimlico v. Sainsbury’s (#ulink_6dd84924-dc75-50c9-8c19-7887f7f7bd55)

The battle against the building of a Sainsbury’s in Pimlico, on the site of the former Wilton Road bus garage behind Victoria Station, is one of the most high profile ever fought between a local community and a supermarket chain. Behind-the-scenes wheelings and dealings in this controversial case, exposed by the Sunday Times investigative Insight team, made the front page. Simon Jenkins (#litres_trial_promo) wrote a rousing column in the Evening Standard opposing the development as an unwelcome precedent. ‘The store is big, intrusive and will offer parking, thus contriving to offend every maxim of modern planning … A superstore is a neutron bomb. It wipes out commercial life for streets around, while its parking spaces jam the traffic … Quite apart from encouraging more traffic, most of the new stores are large and ugly. That they may replace ugly gas works or goods yards is no excuse,’ he wrote. The debate continued on BBC2’s Newsnight. It was rare for a local community to make such a stand. But Sainsbury’s got its way in the end.

Local residents first got wind of the proposal in 1995. Sainsbury’s had been smart. It had got together with a housing association to put forward a mixed development for a superstore with flats built above it. Half these flats would be private, but the other half would be low-cost, affordable housing, of which there was a serious shortage in the area. This type of housing had been given the highest priority in the local council’s (Westminster) development plan.

Opposing a supermarket pure and simple was one thing; opposing one linked with such a desirable sweetener to the local council was another. The proposed site was in an area zoned for retail development, so residents’ organisations, sensing that all-out opposition was fruitless, set themselves the more reasonable task of trying to get the Sainsbury’s plan cut down to the right scale for the site.

They seemed to be on strong ground. Despite its proximity to Victoria, Pimlico is a low-rise, densely populated district, part of which is a formal conservation area. The taller buildings are no more than five or six storeys high. It conforms very well to the notion of the ‘urban village’ that today’s planners are keen to support as an antidote to the ‘Anytown, Anywhere’ big-box development that strips life and character from urban centres. The planning brief for the area was that buildings should be a maximum of six storeys. In this respect, the scale and height of the proposed development – which was to rise to eleven storeys – seemed totally out of keeping. When one sees the finished development, one local architect’s prophecy that it would be ‘like having a cross channel ferry in a yacht marina’ appears totally justified. As Moy Scott, secretary of Pimlico FREDA (#litres_trial_promo), the umbrella group for sixteen active residents’ associations, put it, ‘it seemed as though Sainsbury’s was bringing Victoria to Pimlico’.

The new store would mean more lorries and new car traffic too. It would receive twenty-five deliveries a day, necessitating fifty trips in and out through narrow streets more suited to small cars and bicycles. Already a badly parked delivery van was enough to cause a jam. Sainsbury’s had also admitted that it expected 90 per cent of the store’s customers to be drawn in from outside Pimlico – Victoria, Mayfair, St James, the City and Chelsea. Inevitably such shoppers would be attracted by the spacious underground car park that was to be built.

Residents were upset not only by the height and bulk of the development and the traffic implications for surrounding streets but also by the impact it would surely have on local shops. Pimlico is relatively unusual in that it has a network of small shops, only a handful of which belong to chains. These independent shops are concentrated in and around Tachbrook Street, the traditional heart of the area, home to a daily market selling fish, fruit and vegetables since 1877. Pre-Sainsbury’s, the selection of some 165 shops was one that any urban area would envy. Whether you wanted to buy a newspaper, have keys cut, find freshly ground Parmesan, pick up a bouquet of flowers, get a prescription or source the ingredients for a special meal, you could do it in a small, convenient radius.

But what would become of these shops once Sainsbury’s had opened its titan store? With a gross trading floorspace of 30,000 square feet, and eight franchise shops below, it would have more than double the sales space of all the existing shops in Pimlico. It would also be five times larger than the existing Tesco round the corner. Local residents suggested to Sainsbury’s that it cut back the size of its proposed store while retaining the same proposed number of product lines. Sainsbury’s was already well represented in the area, they pointed out. There was, and still is, a vast, fully comprehensive Sainsbury’s at Nine Elms only 1½ miles south and a smaller Sainsbury’s in Victoria Street, ten minutes’ walk away. Why, local residents wondered, did Sainsbury’s need another huge store?

Supported by local objections, Westminster Council refused Sainsbury’s planning permission in 1996 and then again in 1997, when it submitted a second proposal with the number of flats reduced from 178 to 160. Sainsbury’s appealed against these decisions and the matter went to a local inquiry. There then ensued a David and Goliath struggle.

Not content simply to rely on Westminster Council to oppose the proposal, the local community got itself organised with an experienced planning consultant to put its case. It tempered well-reasoned, carefully assembled, knowledgeable planning arguments with the genuine, heartfelt concerns of local people. Through Pimlico FREDA, the local traders of Pimlico appealed to the inspector in charge of hearing the appeal. They represented all the little shops who worked hard and stayed up late to service the community: Buckles and Brogues, Gastronomia Italia, Park Lane Cleaners, Stanwells Homecare Centre, Sea Harvest Fisheries, Market News – the list went on. Their case had a common-sense logic to it. ‘We believe that our area is unique in central London with its local market and small businesses. Many of these facilities would be unable to survive the opening of another supermarket and therefore given the government’s policy of city centre rejuvenation, we feel we should be afforded the protection of such a policy. Unless of course we are to have lifeless local communities that are cultural and environmental deserts,’ they wrote. ‘The survival of our community is at stake. We canvass your support in our endeavours against this appeal by Sainsbury’s.’

But prospects didn’t look good for the objectors. Sainsbury’s clearly had a war chest of money to pay for the costs of the appeal and could afford the best planning and legal team that money could buy. The whole affair had become political too. The outcome of such planning appeals is usually determined by the planning inspector. Pimlico objectors had been informed in writing in 1996 that this would be the case. After the general election in 1997, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, Secretary of State for Environment and Transport, had rescinded this decision and decided to ‘call in’ the appeal and personally determine its outcome. Questions were asked in the House of Commons by Tim Yeo, the shadow Environment spokesman. He pressed Mr Prescott to explain why he had intervened in this particular appeal, and asserted that four months after doing so Mr Prescott had met Lord Sainsbury, a well-known donor to the Labour Party. Mr Prescott confirmed to him that the subject of ‘mixed-use housing and retail development’ was amongst the topics discussed with the Sainsbury’s chairman. He also confirmed that he had held no similar meetings with objectors to Sainsbury’s Pimlico proposal. Mr Prescott seemed to be rather keen on listening to supermarkets. His department had just approved a scheme to build a huge and controversial out-of-town superstore near Richmond (#litres_trial_promo) in Surrey. This had been hailed by planners and developers as Labour signalling that it was relaxing the tougher planning regulations imposed by the former Conservative Environment Secretary, John Gummer. In the event, the inquiry inspector found in favour of Sainsbury’s and Mr Prescott agreed. Sainsbury’s got the planning permission it was after.

Within ten days of Sainsbury’s opening, leaflets were dropping through Pimlico residents’ letterboxes. ‘Support your local shopkeepers and stalls,’ they read. Evidently, Pimlico’s independent shopkeepers were already feeling the pinch. Three months after Sainsbury’s opening, one local shopkeeper told me that his retail sales had dropped by 18 per cent and that he was increasingly dependent on restaurant wholesale orders for the viability of his business. The ultimate irony, effectively a two-fingered gesture to community objectors, was that this was no ordinary Sainsbury’s, rather a ‘marketplace’ store, in the mould of Sainsbury’s Market at Bluebird in the King’s Road. It was to be called the ‘Market at Pimlico’. It had ten of what Sainsbury’s calls ‘specialist counters’, including a master butcher, a fishmonger, a charcuterie and a hot carvery with ‘tailor-made’ sandwiches. The message seemed to be crystal clear. Why bother with Tachbrook market or any of the existing 165 local shops when you could drive past the lot of them and shop in Sainsbury’s marketplace? Who needs a thriving independent shopping centre when you can settle for Sainsbury’s counterfeit lookalike?

SUPERMARKET FOOD (#ulink_c98af6df-becc-5d02-bc92-beae9e75ae67)

7 Giving us what we want (#ulink_a1e0bac1-2cff-5835-a90b-11f945b60176)

In the world of British supermarketing, there is a curious gender imbalance. The bulk of shoppers in supermarkets are women. Stores typically operate with a predominantly female workforce under a male manager. As you go up the supermarket tree to the people who make the decisions about what we will eat, the personnel become overwhelmingly male. When you get to chief executive level, you find a handful of fabulously well-remunerated men who are confident that they know more about what the average customer wants than she knows herself. In a sense they do. They can tell us what we want. They know they have a captive audience.

British supermarket chains say that they must be keeping consumers happy or else we would simply push away our trolleys and take our business elsewhere. As one industry commentator put it, ‘They [consumers] have voted with their feet (#litres_trial_promo) – or rather their car keys – patronising the supermarkets and superstores at the expense of other outlets … The vast gleaming superstores … St Tesco on the roundabout, St Sainsbury at the interchange, open seven days a week, 24 hours a day – are the clearest possible evidence that consumers are getting what they want.’ It is true that in the UK, unlike every other country in Europe, food shopping, for a majority of people, has become synonymous with supermarket shopping. For many people, however, that state of affairs is not a matter of positive choice but the line of least resistance. In a 2001 Radio 4 poll (#litres_trial_promo), 71 per cent of listeners who phoned in agreed with the motion that ‘We would all be better off without supermarkets’. In 1999, research carried out by the retail consultancy Verdict revealed that six million shoppers – that’s one in four of all shoppers – were dissatisfied with the supermarket where they bought their groceries. Two million of these shoppers wanted to abandon shopping in superstores entirely. In 2003, a NOP poll (#litres_trial_promo) conducted on behalf of the New Economics Foundation found that 70 per cent of respondents would prefer to shop locally rather than in an out-of-town supermarket, while 50 per cent thought supermarkets’ size and strength should be controlled to stop them putting local independent retailers out of business.

Even Jamie Oliver, the celebrity face of Sainsbury’s, seems to prefer shopping in any place other than a supermarket. Mr Oliver has said that working with Sainsbury’s has given him the opportunity to ‘influence the food choices of millions of people’. But opening up his personal food shopping address book for Observer Food Monthly, he enthusiastically reeled off a list of his favourite independent fishmongers, butchers, specialist food shops, farmgate suppliers and markets.

Supermarket shopping may not be top of many people’s favourite occupations, but it seems to be the way of the world. Most people don’t see any feasible alternative and the more we shop in supermarkets, the more we forget that such an alternative still might or ever could exist. And when we rely on one supermarket chain for almost all the food we buy, we can easily be manipulated to accept what they want to give us. As a consequence, supermarkets’ power to shape our shopping and eating habits is phenomenal, and they know it. The trick is to get us to think that they are responding to our needs and desires when actually we are responding to theirs. ‘Giving customers 0what they want’ is supermarket-speak for ‘selling what we want to sell’. Supermarkets use a number of strategies to pull off this brainwashing.

The number one supermarket ruse is, having created a problem, to present themselves as the solution to it. In countries with a healthy food culture where the population is generally thinner and healthier, people see food shopping as an indispensable, worthwhile and not necessarily disagreeable part of the process of feeding yourself well. In countries where there are still independent food shops and markets, shopping can still be a pleasurable, stimulating, diverse experience which involves interesting, even friendly interaction with other human beings. Food shopping in UK supermarkets, on the other hand, has become a dreary treadmill where increasingly overweight yet undernourished consumers are invited to stock up with food in the same anonymous, automatic way they fill up their tanks with petrol. It is no coincidence that supermarket shoppers regularly complain about spending large sums of money in their store yet being unable to think of anything to cook that night. Just thinking about supermarket shopping is enough to make most of us feel tired and uninspired. Supermarket shopping trips, for many people, are an exercise in extreme alienation. Nor is it just chance that we seem to be getting fatter yet getting less and less pleasure from feeding ourselves. Supermarket shopping makes us into robots, stopping off at pre-programmed points as we always do. Picking the same old stuff. Buying what supermarkets want us to buy. Terence Blacker (#litres_trial_promo), writing in the Independent, described the experience as follows:

Most people, in order to stay sane, close down their aesthetic sense and human curiosity while being fed through the production line of supermarket shopping. They ignore the other dead-eyed zombies shuffling their way down the aisles as if being led by the trolleys in front of them … moving in a tranquillised daze to the checkout queue. Here, confronted by an exhausted, hollow-eyed employee behind the till, a brief moment of human contact is experienced but anything more than a hurried ‘Hi’ or ‘Busy today?’ will mark you out as an eccentric timewaster.

Columnist Mimi Spencer (#litres_trial_promo) summed up the supermarket shopping experience perfectly when she said that it had all the allure of going to the chiropodist:

I just got back from Tesco. Hellish. Personally, I’d rather eat my own liver than have to trolley off to the supermarket … I try to enter a state of suspended animation when I visit my local superstore, a bit like I did when I gave birth. My eyes glaze over. My shoulders slump over the wayward trolley, as it fills up with cos lettuces and cartons of soup – which, I know, I will ritualistically throw in the bin ten days later when the lettuce has turned into soup and the soup has turned into something like the stuff that shot from that girl’s mouth in The Exorcist.

Having made the whole experience of food shopping dehumanising, functional and boring, supermarkets portray themselves as white knights ‘lightening the load’, riding to the rescue of stressed working women to relieve them of the enormously oppressive burden of food shopping. They promise short checkout queues, a parking space and ways to help you whizz round getting this unpleasant business over and done with as fast as possible. Supermarket language reinforces the idea of supermarkets as the housewife’s helper and harassed working woman’s guardian angel over and over again in their language. ‘Every little helps.’ Every meal is a potential problem for which supermarkets have a ‘meal solution’. Supermarkets have fostered the stereotype of the ‘time-poor, cash-rich’ shopper because this gives them another business opportunity to sell lucrative value-added processed food to us. Supermarkets have made not having the time to either shop or cook – and hence living on a diet of processed food – into a sign of social status to which everyone aspires, whether or not they have the means.

Despite these ‘solutions’, having deprogrammed us as creative shoppers and convinced us that food shopping is necessarily a drag by making it a drag, supermarkets face the potential problem of having to motivate a passive, apathetic customer base. The knack then is to keep us just interested enough to take up their strategically placed special offers and lucrative value-added lines, but not so clued up on food that we realise that the store is devoid of real quality choices and so start looking elsewhere. They want to turn us into trusting customers who can be propelled round the store, following their secret retail map, picking up our masters’ ball and dropping it obediently at the checkout. In the overwhelmingly male realm of supermarketing, customers (women) are seen as rather dim subjects who can be programmed, through a series of gimmicks, to want almost anything, seeing a fake diversity and choice in every category shelf.

Safeway, for example, has helpfully colour-coded its bagged salads into ‘orange’ (sweet tasting), ‘green’ (mild) and ‘purple’ (more distinct flavour). Several chains grade their cheese numerically according to strength. Sainsbury’s Continental cheeses now come colour-coded: soft cheese is blue, hard is red, goat’s is green and blue cheese is aqua. These kindergarten classification schemes make no attempt to educate or really inform consumers about the tastes or properties of food. If supermarkets did genuinely educate consumers, we would soon see the dreary homogeneity of what’s on offer. Instead such schemes give chains the opportunity to sell very similar lines in multiple forms, so increasing the likelihood of a sale.

When apathy with a food category or product mounts, supermarkets get together with manufacturers to dream up new ways of selling the same thing to us. In 2003, for example, Safeway joined forces with Unilever and Birds Eye Walls to try out new ways of marketing frozen foods, an ailing part of the supermarket repertoire. ‘The aim of the trial,’ explained Safeway’s frozen category buyer, ‘is to create a warmer shopping environment with clearer sub-category segmentation in order to make shopping the category easier for our customers.’ He added that one of the main barriers to buying frozen was customers’ preference for fresh. ‘We have tackled this through food images displayed behind light boxes to convey strong food values along with the use of our new frozen strapline “Frozen For Freshness”,’ he said. A cynical translation might read: ‘Frozen sales are dropping because people prefer fresh so we’ll make the frozen stuff look more appealing by selling it beside attractively lit pictures of mouthwatering fresh food and the strapline will make it sound as though the frozen is as good, or even better than fresh.’

Deskilling shoppers by undermining our confidence is another supermarket ploy to make us more easily manipulated. Supermarket press offices regularly spew out carefully designed ‘Did you know that the customer doesn’t know?’ or ‘stupid shopper’ type of research that characterises the typical shopper as ignorant and desperately in need of the tutoring that only supermarkets can supply. (That supermarkets might be main contributors to this state of ignorance is never mentioned – they want to be seen as benevolent educators.) In 2003, for example, Tesco’s press relations office phoned food journalists asking them if they knew that many people use the wrong methods of cooking for joints of meat. Its research showed that only 17 per cent of consumers aged between 21 and 35 had heard of common cuts of meat such as brisket, fore rib, chump and loin. Those aged between 36 and 50 did better – 68 per cent knew what they were talking about – but they were eclipsed by 51–70-year-olds, who knew not only which was which but how to cook them. These results are not surprising when you consider that most younger people’s shopping experience is confined to supermarkets, where meat shelves are lined with a narrow selection of mainly prime cuts, and meat counters are often staffed by people who lack the training or experience that the traditional butcher had to explain various meat cuts and their uses.

Safeway carried out a similar exercise in July 2002. It surveyed 1,000 people across the UK to find out how much the nation knew about when foods are in season. A yawning knowledge deficit was revealed: 88 per cent of respondents did not know when certain British favourites were in season. Safeway concluded that ‘the vast majority demonstrated a serious lack of knowledge about British food seasonality’. There was no mention that our supermarkets’ policy of stocking the same lines 365 days of the year might have been a contributory factor. Predictably, Safeway’s research found that 81 per cent of respondents ‘look to supermarkets for more education about seasonality’. However, this survey did not nudge Safeway into rethinking its own, self-styled ‘uni-seasonal’ stocking policy by cancelling standing orders for out-of-season exotica such as Kenyan green beans, Thai baby corn and Peruvian asparagus and then filling its shelves with seasonal British produce. Instead it used the survey to promote sales of its premium The Best range. This, it was at pains to point out, featured not only seasonal fruits and vegetables but also ‘prepared products such as recipe dishes’. ‘Hero products’ in this range included chocolate chip cookies, butter pains au chocolat, prawn selection with Thai dip and ready meals such as potato gratin with roasted garlic and chilli caramelised pork hock whose seasonality was less than apparent.

When supermarkets aren’t implying that shoppers are ignorant, they are keen to make them out as stubbornly conservative, almost stupidly inflexible. On a 2002 Radio 4 Food Programme (#litres_trial_promo) about grapes, Tesco’s lead technical manager for fruit was at pains to point out that Tesco and its suppliers had a very clear idea of what its shoppers expected in a grape which meant that Tesco stocked no more than six to eight varieties in a year, selected from some twenty commercial varieties available out of a total of 8,000 varieties. Asked why Tesco insisted on selling such a small number of varieties of grapes, which had been picked green and hence had less flavour and sweetness, its expert acknowledged that in grape-growing countries people knew that the yellower the grape, the sweeter. ‘But if we put yellow grapes on our shelves, our consumers would think those grapes were over-mature and leave them behind,’ he explained. You could almost hear listeners up and down the land murmuring, ‘How do you know that? Did you ever ask us?’ Might Tesco’s choice of grape variety and colour not have more to do with its own need for bulk supply, ease of sourcing and extended shelf life?

A highly experienced fruit wholesaler gave me examples of how supermarkets do not give consumers a qualitative choice but just what they want to stock. ‘A prime example is French Golden Delicious apples. (#litres_trial_promo) Because UK supermarket policy is to sell green Goldens, they mainly source their supplies from the Loire Valley, which is the worst area for full flavour, but they stay green in stores. These apples are virtually unsaleable elsewhere in Europe as the best Goldens are golden and come from higher altitudes, such as Quercy. Another example is salads. Now nearly all the salad produce sold in supermarkets for the greater part of the year is sourced in Holland even though it has no flavour. But it looks perfect and that’s what the supermarkets want.’

In 2003, there was another instance of the supermarket assertion that consumers are besotted with appearance to the exclusion of all other considerations. When the House of Commons International Development Committee grilled supermarket representatives about filling their produce shelves with only cosmetically perfect produce, one MP challenged the supermarket contention that consumers would only buy mangetouts, Cox’s Orange Pippins or other produce if it were all a uniform size and shade. Senior supermarket figures assured the committee that this was indeed the case. Sainsbury’s senior manager for sustainability and product safety refuted any suggestion of blame, identifying the consumer as the problem. ‘The UK customer (#litres_trial_promo) is known to be the foremost in Europe for being fussy about appearance. You can’t deny that.’ Substitute the words ‘UK supermarket chains are’ for ‘The UK customer is’, and you have a sentence that more accurately reflects who calls the shots.

One farmer told me how he goes to Women’s Institutes and other community groups talking about supporting local agriculture. He argues that supermarkets are trying to brainwash the public into doing what the supermarkets want. ‘I hold up examples of naturally misshapen but perfectly wholesome vegetables and say, “Look, the supermarkets say you don’t want these.” In every case, they tell me otherwise.’ I asked an experienced fruit and vegetable wholesaler if it was true that British shoppers are interested only in looks. He said, ‘Mrs Average shopper is now a younger person who only shops in supermarkets and has never known the joys of full-flavoured fruit and vegetables. If her attitude is “If it looks good, it will do,” it’s not her fault. Supermarkets sell us what they want to sell us.’

8 Feeding bad food culture (#ulink_3976895f-8dc8-551e-8abb-457b42fadc4d)

It’s embarrassing, isn’t it, to come from a country with a bad food culture? But that’s how other countries see us: as a nation hooked on junk food. It’s part of our national stereotype. Au pairs return home to regale their astounded families with tales of what British households eat. Visitors remark on the absence of food shops; their jaws drop at the sight of legions of office workers bolting down their lunchtime sandwiches or schoolchildren breakfasting on packets of crisps and cans of coke.

Theories about the roots of Britain’s gastronomic cluelessness stretch back to the enclosures and the Industrial Revolution – the dislocation of food-producing peasants from the countryside to make an industrial workforce and so on. But increasingly, historical explanations seem inadequate to explain fully our current predicament. One contemporary factor is staring us in the face. No country in Europe is so reliant on supermarkets for its food shopping. These days, many British consumers simply see no alternative to shopping in supermarkets. In countries where people eat better, they still do.

The food writer Matthew Fort (#litres_trial_promo) illustrated this point amply when he described the shopping possibilities in the kilometre-long Via Tribunali in Naples:

In it were nine bars or cafés, one rosticceria, three wine shops, three fruit and veg shops (plus several more round various corners), sixteen grocers/delis, four fishmongers, five butchers, a cheese shop … three pizza shops, one tavola calda restaurant, one trattoria and two bakers. And that was besides the hairdressers, electrical shops, tobacconists, shoe shops and clothes shops.

Each was quite small and differed in character from the next … an independent entity, a source of occupation and income for the family that ran it. It was as far removed from the homogeneity of the average British shopping experience as it was possible to imagine. In terms of life, social exchange, sense of community, competitiveness, service abundance, variety and sheer energy, it made me realise what we have lost, what our spineless acquiescence to the culture of supermarkets and retail chains has cost us.

Our supermarkets – and the bodies that lobby on their behalf – like to argue that they are the most comprehensive and sophisticated in the world. They can put every food experience to be had on the planet into the British consumer’s trolley, setting a standard for safety and quality that no foreign chain can match. ‘Food democracy is consumers having access to an unprecedented range of safe food, all year round and at all price points, regardless of where they live. Through economies of scale, innovation and investment, food retailing has helped to deliver a level of food democracy in the UK unimagined before the Second World War,’ said Richard Ali (#litres_trial_promo), food policy director of the British Retail Consortium. Using this liberation rhetoric, he presented supermarket domination of the UK’s grocery spend as a symptom of our healthy open-mindedness, evidence of an improvement in how we feed ourselves. ‘Unfortunately there are those who would wish to introduce the modern day equivalent of the Soviet Decree on Food Dictatorship by encouraging collusion and restricting choice. Any such backwards step holds huge dangers to our economy and people’s quality of life,’ warned Mr Ali. A Britain in which supermarket hegemony is challenged is invariably portrayed by our large retailers as a grim, inconvenient, post-rationing nightmare where no one has ever heard of kiwi fruit and we are all condemned to a monotonous diet of dull, labour-intensive raw ingredients. ‘Queuing at one store then trudging down Watford High Street in the rain to another shop … Is this what people actually want to go back to?’ asked Tesco’s chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy. (#litres_trial_promo)

Using this device, supermarkets habitually present themselves as a progressive solution to Britain’s food difficulties when in fact their enormous power to determine what ends up on our plates is a major part of the problem of our food culture. It is no coincidence that the country most attached to supermarket shopping has the worst eating habits in Europe because we have effectively surrendered control over what we eat to a few powerful chains. In the guise of giving us choice, they simply sell us what suits them.

A classic example of this is the chilled sandwich. The prototype of the chilled sandwich was pioneered by Marks & Spencer. This non-supermarket food retailer has always been a de facto research and development laboratory and trendsetter for other supermarket chains, which habitually follow its lead. In UK supermarket terms, it is a huge success story, a food-retailing breakthrough. ‘The Marks & Spencer sandwich (#litres_trial_promo) is now an icon, representing freshness, quality and flavour (a welcome replacement for the previous cliché of the tired old British Rail sandwich),’ observed one approving industry commentator.

But is it such a great leap forward? Prepacked in its plastic carton, the modern chilled sandwich encapsulates much that is bad about British food. The fundamental concept is flawed because, as any baker can tell you, bread should never be refrigerated. Refrigeration kills any possibility of a proper contrast between crust and crumb because of the prevailing cold and dampness it causes. The best sandwich is the sort that any small shop can whizz up: fresh bread and rolls, straight from a local baker that morning, filled on the spot and sold hours later for more or less instant consumption – a straightforward, simple, sustainable process capable of delivering an end product worth eating. Large food retailers’ centralised systems, however, like sandwiches to be made by a few dedicated sandwich factories, the sort that also sell to petrol station forecourts and mass catering outfits. In 2000, one pre-packed sandwich company supplied almost a quarter of all the sandwiches sold by UK multiple retailers. You may have noticed how many sandwiches seem somewhat similar even when you buy them in different supermarket chains. This concentration of production in a few prolific companies is part of the explanation.

From these dedicated factories, sandwiches are delivered to a regional distribution centre and from there to stores. To satisfy the inevitable hygiene implications generated by this extended process and to survive distribution, they have to be chilled to a glacial temperature. Only certain types of technobread are suitable for this treatment: bread that won’t fall apart when the moisture in the filling leaks into it as it sits on the arctic takeaway shelves. This bread is sandwiched over fillings made up in the supermarket’s prepared food factories: soggy, chopped-up salad leaves, meats you recognise from the ready meals aisles (tikka chicken, barbecue duck, etc.), industrial block cheese, salty tuna and egg mayonnaise without any taste of eggs. It’s no wonder that the sandwiches make such unrewarding eating as well as attacking sensitive teeth with their extreme coldness. But we buy them, even though they aren’t cheap, because we have got used to them since that’s the sort of sandwich supermarkets want to sell us.

The particularly audacious thing about the supermarket prepared-food revolution is the way that supermarkets have taken the culinary limitations of industrial food processing and put a positive spin on them. They claim – erroneously – that their innovation has broadened the British palate, introducing new tastes and flavours, when in fact they are mainly selling us the same standard components, continuously re-assembled and re-marketed in a multiplicity of forms. But since their clientele shop routinely in their stores and so lack any alternative point of reference, this fact usually goes unchallenged. Supermarkets know that because they increasingly control where we shop, the public can be conditioned, by repetition and force of habit, to believe that supermarket TV dinners of the twenty-first century are better than anything they might cook, and possibly even just as good as what they might encounter abroad.

To sustain this tall tale, supermarkets appear to have set themselves a mission of subverting home cooking – the bedrock of any true food culture. Every supermarket chain churns out a stream of recipe cards that purport to encourage home cooking. But home cooking does not make enough money for them. They want the extra margins that can be slipped in with processing. The profits that can be made from convincing people that they don’t need to mash a potato or wash a salad are substantial. So increasingly supermarket shelves are filled with foods that obviate, or at least minimise, the need for any home cooking, and make them a tidy profit at the same time. When chef Rowley Leigh was asked to sample Marks & Spencer ready meals, he estimated that a St Michael pasta and vegetable bake, price £1.99, would cost only 40 pence to make at home while a beef casserole, price £5.58, would cost £1.50 if home made. As food writer Matthew Fort (#litres_trial_promo) put it: ‘Hand in hand with the microwave and the deep freeze – and ably supported by manufacturers and retailers who can gouge higher profit margins on these “value-added” products – convenience foods have all but eliminated the tradition of domestic cookery from British homes.’ Supermarkets have played the major role in this, providing the means by which the UK has become a ‘can’t cook won’t cook’ nation whose idea of a gourmet night is eating a supermarket ready meal on a tray while watching a procession of celebrity chefs cook fantasy food on TV.

Subtly, supermarkets imply that if you’ve still got the time or inclination to cook on a routine basis, you must be a semi-retired loser, puttering away on the sleepy backwaters of modern life, an endangered species as rare as those who make their own clothes. ‘Alongside work (#litres_trial_promo), gym, children, partner, friends and chores, who on earth has a spare second to be a domestic star and spend hours preparing a traditional meal?’ asked Safeway. ‘I certainly wouldn’t bother (#litres_trial_promo) making my own lasagne from scratch now,’ its buying manager for prepared foods told The Grocer. ‘It’s [our lasagne al forno] the classic lifestyle option for the time poor, cash rich consumer.’ Sainsbury’s usually wins the prize for being the most foodie, therefore pro-cooking, amongst the UK-wide supermarket multiples. But even its initiatives to stimulate home cooking are often thinly disguised marketing opportunities to promote sales of ready-made, processed foods. In 2003, for example, when Sainsbury’s launched cooking classes for children (for which parents pay £5) during the school holidays in selected stores, it pegged them to its Blue Parrot Café children’s brand which features self-styled healthier versions of children’s junk food such as chicken nuggets and pizza. Participating children went away with a Blue Parrot ‘goodie bag’ and a Blue Parrot apron, reminders that if they didn’t feel like cooking, they could always get Mum to pick up something ready-made at Sainsbury’s.