Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets

The Great British Cookery Paradox is evidence that supermarkets have made substantial inroads in undermining the nation’s inclination to cook. In spite of the plethora of TV cooking programmes, cookery articles in magazines and newspapers, and cookery books, which should notionally encourage us all to cook, less and less cooking is being done in homes up and down the land. In 2002, UK TV screened 4,000 hours of food programmes (#litres_trial_promo); 900 food books and 25 million words about food and cookery were published. But we seem to spend more time watching chefs cook than cooking ourselves. In 1980, the average meal took one hour to prepare; now it takes twenty minutes. It is predicted that this figure will shrink to eight minutes by 2010. The UK has become a nation of food voyeurs rather than cooks, and supermarkets have supplied both the means and the motive. For every person who, after watching Jamie, Gary or Nigella, goes out to buy the raw materials to cook their recipes at home, it seems there are many more who emerge from supermarkets with up-market, ready-meal lookalikes. ‘People who are proficient in cooking (#litres_trial_promo) … are now beginning to represent a declining proportion within the population … they are arguably also more likely to recognise the difference in cost between purchasing ingredients for home cooking and buying prepared meals,’ market analyst Keynote has concluded – an acknowledgement that the more you cook and know about food, the less you are likely to see supermarket prepared food as either desirable or good value.

A central plank in undermining home cooking and boosting sales of more expensive ready-made foods is blurring the qualitative difference between the real thing and the mass-produced supermarket equivalent. Safeway, for example, describes its The Best (#litres_trial_promo) range as being ‘as tasty, near to authentic and home-made as possible’. The slight qualification in this claim was absent when it launched a new winter range of ‘traditional British food’ ready meals such as pork, cider and apple casserole and toad in the hole – dishes with all the homey, comforting, feel-good virtues of domestic cooking. Safeway cheekily presented it as the ‘cheat’s guide to making it taste as good as Mum’s’. With a little help from Safeway, in the form of ready meals, everyone, it claimed, could be ‘a brilliant cook, a domestic legend’. Somerfield’s magazine highlighted a reader who was ‘planning a “Cheat’s Dinner Party”, passing off Somerfield ready meals as her own creations!’ Sainsbury’s used the same strategy big time when it targeted Christmas dinner (#litres_trial_promo), the one meal in the year most households would expect to cook more or less from scratch, as a processed food opportunity. ‘Who’s to know that you’ve not been slaving away to create a feast? You can take the credit by removing the packaging, safe in the knowledge that Sainsbury’s food experts have taken care of all your festive food needs.’

For years supermarkets have fostered the idea that all over the UK, people are passing off ready meals as home-cooked food without anyone being any the wiser. If that is indeed true, it is a sad indictment of our food awareness. But the proposition strains credulity somewhat. Though it might be possible to pass off a supermarket ready meal as home made to those whose only point of reference is pot noodles, most people can easily spot the difference, if only because supermarket ready meals look and taste depressingly familiar. Most recently, supermarkets have developed ranges of ‘better-than-the-rest’ labels, more upmarket-looking and -sounding ‘gourmet’ brands such as, Safeway, The Best, Tesco’s Finest and Asda’s Extra Special, to cater for ‘well off young couples (#litres_trial_promo) who have been known to pass off the prepackaged food at their dinner parties’. These ranges are an attempt by supermarkets to head off criticism that their food all tastes over-processed and industrial while inserting a more aspirational top range into their portfolio to keep people interested. They look good in the box, and sell for a considerable premium, but on some products the ingredients list is illuminating evidence of the gastronomic gulf between these aspiring home-entertaining specials and the home-cooked article. The ingredients list for a classic French boeuf bourguignon, for example, is relatively short and sweet, containing no unfamiliar ingredients. The equivalent list on one supermarket’s ‘better-than-the-rest’ boeuf bourguignon casserole ran to a substantial paragraph and one needed a degree in chemistry to decode it.

Ingredients in Elizabeth David’s boeuf bourguignon (from French Provincial Cooking) (#litres_trial_promo):

Beef, salt pork or unsalted streaky bacon, onion, thyme, parsley and bay leaves, red wine, olive oil, meat stock, garlic, flour, mushrooms and meat dripping.

Ingredients in a supermarket’s ‘better-than-the-rest’ boeuf bourguignon casserole:

Beef, water, red wine, baby onion, bacon lardons (pork belly; water; salt; dried glucose syrup; stabilisers; sodium polyphosphate, sodium triphosphate, disodium diphosphate; preservative; sodium nitrite; antioxidant; sodium ascorbate; smoke flavouring), onion, modified maize starch, beef stock (concentrated beef broth; yeast extract; glucose; salt; vegetable fat; water, emulsifier; mono-and di-glycerides of fatty acids; rosemary extract), celery, carrot, vegetable stock (with emulsifier: mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids), vegetable oil, white wine vinegar, salt, pork gelatine, thyme, dried glucose syrup, garlic purée, acidity regulators (sodium acetate; sodium citrate), ground bay, antioxidant (sodium ascorbate).

Even allowing for the additional information for manufactured food required under labelling regulations, such a comparison underlined how a supermarket ready meal in a box was a very different animal from its home-cooked equivalent. An advert for Tesco’s Finest range said, ‘It’s like a top chef preparing dinner for you at a moment’s notice.’ Tesco had put together a team of ‘250 of the best of them [chefs]’ to create, amongst other Finest lines, convenience meals using ‘specially sourced ingredients’. But how many top chefs use ingredients such as dried glucose syrup, mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids or acidity regulator?

Having successfully planted the idea that there is no need to cook because factory food is at least as good, if not better, than the home-made equivalent, supermarkets have sought to extend their gastronomic empire by fostering the idea that there is no need to eat out in restaurants either.

Here the most daring stunt has been performed by Sainsbury’s with its Bombay Brasserie meal kits (#litres_trial_promo), named after the celebrated London restaurant. Launching an extended range, Sir Gulam Noon of Noon Products, who makes the range for Sainsbury’s, hailed it as a way for Sainsbury’s shoppers who live outside London to ‘create their own Bombay Brasserie at home’. He said that his company had worked very closely with the restaurant’s chefs ‘to ensure all the dishes were produced to restaurant standards’, encouraging us to believe the implausible proposition that when we reheat a factory curry meal at home it will look and taste the same as one freshly prepared on the spot by top Indian chefs in one of the UK’s foremost restaurants. Only the most gullible would believe that, of course, but such counter-intuitive claims have the effect of making the product being hyped sound better than those that preceded it, so rekindling our interest when it might otherwise wane. Which is exactly what they are intended to do.

9 Why it all tastes the same (#ulink_8bfb98b2-e6ea-5e59-9fc3-574f5375e2c2)

If you habitually shop in one supermarket chain for ready meals, you might occasionally wonder if you are missing out on variety by not trying out rival chains’ offerings. Don’t. There’s a very, very strong chance that despite being sold by different chains, the contents of those boxes will resemble one another closely.

Carry out a ‘tried and tasted’ comparison – a popular consumer journalism exercise which attempts to compare the relative contents of various supermarket chains’ boxed offerings – and the resemblance between the appealingly packaged ready meals that line our supermarket shelves is striking. In 2003, Asian food expert Ken Hom carried out precisely such a test on supermarket Thai green curry, sampling those sold by Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Somerfield and Marks & Spencer. The parameters of tried-and-tested features are often skewed towards supermarkets – a reflection of their grip on the nation’s psyche: usually only supermarket samples are tested, and no restaurant or home-made samples are included in the comparison. Such features demand that there must be winners and losers. An internal hierarchy must be established, even if the entire category is lacking in merit. But the results in this particular taste test were more candid than usual. They spoke volumes about the homogeneity of supermarket food. The same taste criticisms came up with monotony: dry chicken, not spicy, overly sweet, not at all authentic. Though the inevitable ratings implied that one chain’s offering had some slight merit over another’s, Mr Hom sounded distinctly underwhelmed. One tasted ‘more like an airline meal’; another was ‘not green curry as I know it’. The highest score went to ‘the best of the bunch’. One sensed that given a free hand, he might have been happier offering a Eurovision Song Contest ‘nul points’ to the whole lot.

The fact that one chain’s Thai green curry tastes pretty much like all the others – and not at all like any green curry you’d ever encounter in Thailand – is scarcely surprising. There’s a good chance that it was made by the same company that is supplying its rivals. Between 1995 and 2000, for example, Hazlewood Foods was a major chilled meals supplier (#litres_trial_promo) to Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose and Morrisons; S&A to Tesco, Safeway and Asda; Northern Foods to Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Tesco; Geest to Sainsbury’s and Tesco; and Noon to Sainsbury’s and Waitrose. Another company, Uniq (#litres_trial_promo), has worked with various chains developing their low-fat, healthy-eating product ranges such as Marks & Spencer’s Count On Us, Sainsbury’s Be Good To Yourself, Safeway’s Eat Smart and Asda’s Good For You ranges.

Of course one cannot automatically assume, because of this clubby overlap, that supermarkets can’t instruct their faithful suppliers to introduce a genuine ‘point of difference’ to distinguish their chain’s offering from all the others. Recipes may differ, ingredients may come from distinct sources and so on. But taste your way around a few supermarket chilled meals and you will begin to notice how the white sauce in one chain’s cod and parsley pie is surprisingly like another chain’s moussaka topping, how the tomato goo on top of your pizza tastes oddly reminiscent of the Mediterranean-style pasta in tomato and basil sauce, how the Mexican salsa tastes like the Spanish gazpacho and how, if you sampled the sauce on those Malaysian sweet chilli prawns blind, you might easily confuse it with the gravy on the lamb steak with redcurrants.

Think about it a little longer and you’ll pick up the same defining characteristics in almost all savoury supermarket-prepared meals. Any meat will probably be overcooked and dry – a consequence of bulk factory cooking followed by domestic reheating. A salty savouriness without any particular flavour profile prevails. Where a sauce or a liquid element is present, a gloopy consistency is de rigueur. Last but not least, don’t be surprised it looks little like the picture on the box. That enticing image, after all, is the product of long hours of toil put in by a team of food stylists, lighting managers and photographers.

Clearly, when so much food is made for our supermarkets by the same companies, the results are likely to resemble one another. The same state-of-the-art factory line technologies and automated short cuts are used to turn out any mass-produced food object. Any slight personality to be found in the ingredients used is beaten out of them by the time they have been subjected to the various interventions of large-scale food processing. Hence the institutionalised sameness of supermarket ready meals.

Lest consumers begin to tire of this uniformity, supermarkets go in for what is known as ‘sub-branding (#litres_trial_promo)’ or ‘segmentation’. When their shoppers begin to feel like children at Christmas, rather jaded with that new toy, supermarkets like to feed us a stream of novelties that appear to refresh the category even though they are essentially variations of the same thing. It’s just like Barbie, the doll with the abundant hair, pert breasts, long legs and impossibly narrow hips. There is Beach Barbie, Air Hostess Barbie, Aerobic Barbie and so on but she always has the same essential hair, breasts, legs and hips. Supermarket ready meals are the food equivalent: they might as well be Thai Barbie, Bistro Barbie, Café Society Barbie, Vegetarian Barbie or Indian Takeaway Barbie. They look superficially different but the underlying prototype remains the same. The resemblance stops there though because most supermarket ready meals don’t, like 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 (#litres_trial_promo) of culinary discovery’. This thinking produces some very bizarre products: Sainsbury’s ‘American style mini battered chicken fillets (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.

10 Fresh is worst (#ulink_1975dbca-c10a-5812-88ca-5c4847ae2c77)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 example, Sainsbury’s launched a scheme in conjunction with the NHS, where GPs would refer overweight patients to the nearest Sainsbury’s for a guided healthy-eating tour. Staff would ‘point out low fat versions of popular foods, such as ready meals, as well as focusing on cheaper products such as tinned fruit and frozen vegetables’. In a similar initiative, groups of schoolchildren were invited to visit their local Sainsbury’s, where a team of trained food advisers and registered dieticians would ‘talk to them about the various food groups and how they can choose the best foods to keep them healthy’. Sainsbury’s free fruit in schools also sounded like a commendable initiative until you learnt that this was teamed with ‘fruitastic store tours’ run by Sainsbury’s advisers. The message might be ‘Eat more fruit’, but the missing strapline was ‘and make sure you buy it in Sainsbury’s’.

In one such initiative by Waitrose, this message was made explicit. It sponsors the Kid’s Cookery School (KCS), a charity that encourages children to cook. KCS offers paying cookery workshops with some free places for children from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’, which have included workshops run by Waitrose staff, focused around visits to Waitrose stores. In the summer of 2002, KCS ran a two-day sponsored extravaganza during which children toured Waitrose and KCS’s principal and chief executive held free workshops for children ‘to promote the fantastic range of fruits and vegetables that Waitrose stock’. Likewise every sheet sent out free to schools as part of Waitrose’s Food Explorers ‘education packs’ (#litres_trial_promo) carries the prominent flag/logo – some would say advert – Waitrose@school.

Children figure prominently in supermarket healthy-eating drives. The food industry has fostered the concept of separate children’s food as a distinct category from adult food and this has created a whole new gravy train for retailers. As well as Waitrose several other supermarkets have come up with special ranges. Somerfield has the Funky Food Factory, Sainsbury’s offers the Blue Parrot Café, Safeway has its KIDS ‘I’d like …’ range and Waitrose has Food Explorers. Viewed charitably, these healthy-eating drives are sincere, if misguided, attempts to offer healthier food that appeals to children. Viewed cynically, they are efforts to exploit parents who worry about what their offspring eat by developing highly profitable added-value lines. The ranges comprise a selection of items with distinctly different merits. All include small fruits in special packaging. When I checked Waitrose’s offerings in November 2003, Food Explorers bananas cost 19.8 pence each while ordinary small bananas cost 17.9 pence each. This premium charged for Food Explorers was repeated with ‘easy peel’ Clementines. Mini-clementines in the Food Explorers range cost 96 pence per pound while ordinary clementines, larger in size, cost 90 pence per pound. That same month, a Friends of the Earth survey (#litres_trial_promo) found that in Tesco ‘Kids Snack Pack Carrots’ were on sale at thirteen times the price of Value carrots, a trend repeated at Asda where ‘Snack Pack Carrot Crunchies’ cost ten times more than loose carrots.

When it comes to processed food in children’s ranges, the chains are very careful about what claims they make, the operative word being healthier as opposed to healthy. The Funky Food Factory (#litres_trial_promo) components contain ‘a minimum of additives’ and levels of salt and sugar are ‘carefully controlled’. The Blue Parrot Café (#litres_trial_promo) guarantees ‘controlled fat, restricted colours, no preservatives and no added flavour enhancers’. Likewise Food Explorers ‘contains no artificial sweeteners, flavourings and colours’ and contains ‘controlled levels of fat, added sugar and salt’. Safeway says its KIDS ‘I’d like …’ range ‘has been developed within nutritional guidelines to contain controlled levels of fat, salt and sugar so you can rest assured they [children] are eating healthier, nutritionally balanced foods’. Favourites in this range include Chicken Ketchup Kievs, mini jam tarts and Cheese & Onion Sky Mix, described as ‘cheese and onion flavour 3D moon, star and planet-shaped potato, wheat and rice snacks’.

What supermarkets are aiming for in children’s ranges is to provide a tick list of apparently healthy components which encourages parents to put two and two together and make five. They may look good, but in essence they are generally only slightly improved versions of familiar processed foods, often embracing lines which, in any other context, would look like junk. The labelling often seeks to make a major virtue out of every slight improvement. What they should really say on the label is ‘Better than the standard food industry equivalent in some respect’, which is not saying a lot.

The Food Explorers range, for example, claims to be ‘good for children’. Adverts say ‘what may sound like kid’s junk food is, in fact, healthy food’. This reassuring guarantee, however, is applied to some surprising foods. Parents who thought they understood the basics of healthy eating might be at a loss to understand what was especially healthy about raspberry-ripple-flavoured water, toffee caramel balls breakfast cereal, chocolate chip cookies or toffee sauce. This last item – a Food Explorers ‘treat’ – is 65 per cent sugars, but it bears the reassuring label ‘25 per cent less fat than typical toffee sauce’. Many savoury Food Explorers lines are slightly adapted versions of ubiquitous supermarket ready meals such as chicken tikka, sweet and sour chicken, lasagne and shepherd’s pie which do little or nothing to extend the boundaries of children’s eating as their ‘Explorers’ title might imply. As food writer Lynda Brown (#litres_trial_promo) put it:

The Food Explorers range is not a genuine effort to seriously tackle children’s nutrition, but primarily to wean kids and their mothers on processed food in jazzy packaging that has a bit less of the very ingredients causing problems in the first place. Either that, or they have the audacity to reinvent basic items like dried fruit as something specially designed for kids and charge handsomely for it. As a Waitrose shopper, I am personally very disappointed. There might be the odd okay item, but how on earth a supermarket chain which prides itself on a passion for food quality can think that their gloopy, sickly sweet toffee sauce has anything to do with good food or nutrition beats me. To call such foods a ‘treat’ is insulting their customer’s intelligence.

Sainsbury’s Blue Parrot Café range is promoted as ‘healthier food for kids … specially developed to deliver great taste with improved nutritional quality’. But nutritionists at the Food Commission, the independent food watchdog, were left scratching their heads over several items in the range, not least the blackcurrant-flavoured sparkling water drink.

You might expect (#litres_trial_promo) that this product with its luscious pictures of blackcurrant fruit would contain enough blackcurrant juice to warrant Sainsbury’s on-pack advice: ‘A glass of fruit juice (150ml) counts towards your 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day’. No such luck. There is so little blackcurrant juice in this product, that a percentage is not even given, which according to food labelling law, indicates that there is so little blackcurrant juice in this bottle that it is simply there as a flavouring. And whilst the product contains some apple juice, sugar is the top ingredient after water.

was the Food Commission’s withering assessment.

Sainsbury’s interpretation of healthy eating advice has already ruffled feathers at the Department of Health. Along with Tesco and Somerfield, it has spurned the government’s five-a-day logo. Sainsbury’s says that the government logo is ‘too restrictive because it can only be applied to fresh fruit and vegetable products that have no added salt, fat or sugar’. All three chains have their own five-a-day logos, which allow a broader interpretation that can embrace processed food.

There is more than an element of poacher-turned-gamekeeper in supermarkets’ attitude to healthy eating, because the truth is that our large food retailers all make considerable profit out of selling over-processed, nutritionally debased, industrial food and have no intention of surrendering that in a benevolent mission to rescue the nation’s health. Their apparently high-minded aspirations are given the lie by the relative loading of what they actually sell.

Take a few minutes to walk the aisles of a typical supermarket and roughly measure for yourself how much aisle space is given to each broad category of food. You don’t need a tape measure for this exercise; paces will do. Then divide everything edible you see into two categories: first fresh, unprocessed raw ingredients, and then processed food. What will be instantly apparent is how the latter dwarfs the former. You will see that the space given to ready meals frequently outstrips that given to fresh meat and fish combined. Fruit and vegetables, despite being tactically located by the entrance to create the impression of a store bursting with healthy fresh produce, increasingly occupy less gondola (shelf) space than ready meals, crisps, snacks or fizzy drinks. In other words, the selection you see pushes you towards processed food and makes you feel less inclined to cook. In this respect, UK supermarkets are strikingly different from European ones. Phil Daoust (#litres_trial_promo), a writer who moved from London to Alsace, summed up the difference in the Guardian. ‘The other morning I went to the supermarket without any clear idea of what I was going to buy. In Britain I would have come away with some sort of pasta bake, a pork pie, perhaps a Thai-style stir fry. I left the Intermarché with potatoes, lamb’s lettuce, steaks and wine. That night my daughter and I ate steak au poivre, garlic mash and salad with a light vinaigrette.’ In Britain, fewer and fewer people cook, microwaves are being installed rather than ovens and some homes don’t have a table on which to eat any more. More people are going for the easy option, which contributes to them getting fatter and less healthy, and they are strongly encouraged to do that by the supermarket system.

One fresh chilled food supplier observed wryly that UK supermarkets would stop selling fresh unprocessed food entirely if they thought they could get away with it. ‘Whether it’s melons, milk or mince, fresh unprocessed food is just full of hassle. It’s a pain in the butt. It doesn’t look nice, it’s inconsistent, it takes a lot of management by the store. If it stays an extra day or two in depot, they’ve lost it because it’s past its best. The less fresh food they can do the better as far as they are concerned. They stock it because they have to, because people expect it.’

Supermarkets feed this expectation with specialist counters – fresh meat and fish, delicatessen, ‘food to go’, hot pies, ‘curry pots’, hot carvery, salad bar, etc. These support the illusion that supermarkets offer all the fresh food virtues of the traditional, more personalised marketplace or vibrant high street, more conveniently organised under one roof. Morrisons prominently names the aisle with these sections as ‘Market Street’. In some newer stores, Sainsbury’s tries to create a market feel with an area dedicated to specialist counters at the front of the store. In supermarket language, such counters are ‘hero departments’ (#litres_trial_promo) because they have ‘pulling power’. They bring people into the store and create an excitement that aisle after aisle of standard grocery products can’t. They add ‘theatre’ or excitement to the supermarket shopping experience.

Some of these specialist counters are more convincing than others. Morrisons, for example, has staff in each store who make up salads daily for self-service salad bars. (#litres_trial_promo) Asda, on the other hand, has counters which promise that pizza is ‘Freshly Made For You’ (#litres_trial_promo), but in the Asda store I visited, ‘freshly made’ consisted of putting prepared toppings (chopped ham, grated cheese, pepperoni) on top of ready-made pizza bases, then shrink wrapping them. At one Safeway pizzeria (#litres_trial_promo) counter I visited, the pizza oven had a log-effect oven which, to the casual passer-by, gave the impression of a traditional wood-fired oven. Staff behind the counter told me that although the dough could be rolled out into one of two sizes on the spot, it was not made on the premises.

Produce sections also provide supermarkets with an opportunity to create a healthy image and create a mini-high street feel. Launching Sainsbury’s 2003 ‘First For Fresh’ (#litres_trial_promo) – a major overhaul of its produce presentation – the chain’s project manager explained that it was about ‘re-emphasising our excellence in fresh food to the consumer’. When customers first came in they would see ‘abundant displays, merchandised with a lot of flair, using colours and varieties to best effect’, she said, adding that blackboard-type signage would give it a ‘traditional greengrocer feel’.

But even on the produce shelves it is obvious that supermarkets want to sell us processed food. Sainsbury’s, for example, has a Food To Go line called ‘Fully Prepared Apple Bites’ which consists of apple slices dipped in a vitamin C solution (#litres_trial_promo) and then placed in a ‘pillow pack’ filled with modified air to stop them going brown. They cost twice the price of an apple. Yet as Brian Logan reflected in the Guardian, the apple in its intact form is the original convenience food, a natural ‘food to go’ with its own edible packaging, perfect for those age-old apple dissecting devices with which we are all equipped, teeth.

Farcical though ‘Fully Prepared Apple Bites’ (#litres_trial_promo) might seem, the business logic behind this is simple. There is a limit to what you can charge for straightforward unprocessed ingredients. But add value to them through some sort of food processing, then package them appealingly, and the sky is the limit. There’s only so much you can ask, after all, for a kilo of potatoes, no matter how esoteric the variety or well scrubbed the spud. Overdo your margin, and you get the reputation for being a rapacious retailer. But sell those potatoes as a ‘just reheat’ gratin, or a microwavable potato croquette, and you’ll be quids in, with the added bonus that the costing behind the price will be less transparent to customers than it would be with unprocessed food. Provided the ‘pick-up’ price is attractive, most people will not have any idea whether value-added food represents true value for money. One meat supplier told me: ‘They [supermarkets] constantly encourage us to come up with processed food convenience lines on which they can make better margins. They only make about 10 per cent on fresh meat but they need at least 20 per cent to cover their costs. That’s why so little promotional activity is around fresh meat. But they have to stock it because it’s a “must-have”. On processed meat products, they can make as much as a 43 per cent margin and that’s why they like to sell them.’

Supermarkets’ fondness for processing food in some way so as to add value and make more money is bad news for our health. In 2004, Which? Magazine found that processed fruit and vegetables in supermarkets – such as prepared Brussels sprouts, broccoli florets and melon slices – had seriously depleted levels of vitamin C, the most striking example being a bag of Asda sliced runner beans which contained 89 per cent less vitamin C than the typical textbook runner bean.

There is also another reason why supermarkets load their offer with processed food. Mass-produced food that can be churned out over and over again in vast, uniform quantities, made by a handful of big manufacturers who jump to the big retailers’ tune, processed food lends itself to supermarket retailing: it gives them the ability to put a standard, regular product into every store nationwide, a product that doesn’t require any on-the-spot specialist handling. Big Food and Big Retail are two sides of the same coin. Industrial food lends itself to the supermarkets’ heavily centralised, highly mechanical distribution systems, but fresh raw ingredients don’t. Unlike cat food and rice crispies, they are irritatingly subject to the vagaries of nature. Apples don’t all grow on a tree to the same size to conveniently fit into moulded polystyrene packs of four. A herd of cattle won’t all obligingly provide steaks of uniform dimension. Some stubborn types of fruits and vegetables simply cannot be made to grow all year round, however much that would suit supermarket systems. All the plaice that might be fished in the waters around the UK is not conveniently landed at one harbour so that supermarkets can instruct a favoured supplier to buy them all up.

In other words, because fresh raw ingredients are a natural, rather than industrial product, they require more specific, less uniform sourcing and more knowledgeable, experienced and flexible handling than is the supermarket norm. Because of their retailing power, we might assume that supermarkets would handle such perishable cargo in an infinitely more sophisticated and more expert manner than the independent fishmongers, butchers, cheesemongers and greengrocers they put out of business. The irony is that despite the apparently intricate technological infrastructure that supports supermarket food retailing – all those refrigerated lorries pounding up and down the motorway, all those jets transporting food from the other side of the world in a matter of hours, those comprehensive logistics imposed on suppliers in the name of consumer demand – supermarkets have not proved to be supreme champions at delivering fresh and varied food in peak condition. Although supermarkets may be efficient enough at shipping commodities like tinned tomatoes and toilet roll around the country, when it comes to that critical fresh department, their goals and systems actually get in the way of doing a good job.