Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets

11 Permanent global summertime (#ulink_521e4f1b-b1d9-5536-a5ff-4ce9dae35b92)

A Briton born a hundred years ago, resurrected and propelled around the typical modern supermarket, would be astounded at the staggering choice that’s on offer. Entering via the fruit and vegetable aisle, he or she might even conclude that his children’s children live in a latter-day Garden of Eden. How else would you explain that eye-catching cornucopia? Modern consumers who actually eat the stuff, however, are less impressed.

In 2002, an article I wrote for the Guardian ‘Weekend’ entitled ‘Strange Fruit’ (#litres_trial_promo), attacking the quality of supermarket fruit and vegetables, received an unusually large, impassioned and supportive postbag. One Cambridgeshire reader wrote in referring to the ‘gastronomical tyranny’ of the supermarket fruit and vegetable shelves. ‘The supermarkets’ dumbing down of our taste experience isn’t just confined to selecting varieties with longest shelf life and least flavour,’ he continued and went on to relate a personal taste experiment. ‘Last week I compared a Victoria plum from our garden with one bought from Sainsbury’s. One was full of flavour and a succulent mouthful, the other tasteless pap. You can guess which was which,’ he wrote. A reader from Gloucestershire yearned for produce that ‘tasted good as well as looked good’. A London reader was angered by a supermarket spokesman quoted in the article who had insisted that consumers were happy with their offering. ‘He needs to know,’ she wrote, ‘that people are not happy with what they are getting and that we don’t want “freshly prepared lines to fit modern lifestyles”. We want seasonal produce with flavour. It’s time to boycott supermarket produce and refamiliarise ourselves with our local greengrocers,’ she concluded.

Increasingly, people have become disenchanted with supermarket produce. One reason is that it is predicated on a new nature-defying order where every conceivable fruit and vegetable grown anywhere is available all the time. I named it ‘permanent global summertime’ (PGST). Supermarkets’ pursuit of PGST means that they cannot be open with customers. In January, for example, a knowledgeable greengrocer would know that there are no peaches to be had anywhere in the world that are worth eating by the time they arrive in the UK and would simply stop stocking them. In May, confronted with a customer seeking parsnips, he might gently suggest that they were out of season and suggest a more appropriate alternative. But supermarkets don’t have this option because such candour would give the lie to the dream they peddle in which it is both feasible, and indeed reasonable, for the UK shopper to expect virtually every horticultural product on the planet every day.

Supermarkets promote this artificial reality because they know that fruit and vegetables are a ‘destination category’: (#litres_trial_promo) in other words, they form an initial impression that can clinch a consumer’s choice of store or might even persuade them to switch stores. The produce section is attractive window dressing for everything else from washing powder to custard creams. It gives chains an opportunity to differentiate themselves from one another. If you have a fruit or vegetable ‘exclusive’, your whole chain seems more interesting to the consumer. The more unusual or rare, the more environmentally right-on, the better. As a Sainsbury’s buyer pointed out, ‘Adams Pearmain (#litres_trial_promo) [a traditional English apple variety] offers a genuine point of difference.’ Supermarkets would hate us to get the idea that one chain is very much like another. So to enhance the impression of astounding choice throughout their stores, they stock as many different types of fruit and vegetables as possible.

PGST may look good, but in the name of consumer choice and public health the irregularity and diversity that is part of the natural order has been eliminated, not to benefit consumers but to fit the way our big food retailers like to do business. In essence, this way means sourcing vast quantities of easy-to-retail, long shelf-life standard varieties, grown to rigid size and cosmetic specifications, that can be supplied 365 days a year. ‘Quality in supermarket terms means a constant supply of produce that matches their stereotype in terms of shape, size and colour,’ one packer told me. ‘It must have acceptable sugar and pressure levels and mustn’t taste actively unpleasant. Hi-tech, low-taste, odour-free produce is the norm.’

That is why supermarkets have made produce shopping a routine, uninspiring experience, effectively turning shoppers into robotic Stepford Wives, loading up their trolleys each week with identikit purchases. No wonder the nation’s fruit and vegetable consumption is declining. Eating ‘five a day’ is indeed a daunting and unrewarding mission if you shop in a supermarket selling Midwich Cuckoo-style produce. And in practical terms, by fostering the concept of the one-stop, weekly shop, supermarkets have drastically reduced the opportunities we have to purchase fruit and vegetables of any kind. Many consumers have simply given up buying pricey items such as plums, strawberries, peaches and apricots entirely because they are such a dismal let-down. The frisson of excitement that true seasonality provides, and the appetite-whetting response it should generate, are absent. Inspiration is shrivelled, for example, by the stultifying knowledge that whether it’s March, July or November, you will always find grapes in the middle of gondola three, on aisle number two, and they will always be Thomson Seedless. As food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (#litres_trial_promo) put it, ‘The downside of the culture of infinite year round choice is a kind of options paralysis: there’s so much on offer you don’t know where to start. Understanding the seasons brings a sense of structure, rhythm and rightness to your shopping and cooking. In a world where the methods of food production are rapidly unravelling into madness, seasonality is sanity, offering the best and quickest solution to the never-ending question: what shall I cook today?’ Shoppers no longer see onetime supermarket novelty breakthroughs such as iceberg lettuce, fine green beans, baby corn and mangetouts as a welcome relief from the limitations of native seasonal vegetables. Instead their ubiquity has made them perpetual clichés, a larger-than-life reminder of supermarkets’ obsession with creating a new agricultural world order where the sun always shines. When Sainsbury’s canvassed shoppers in its prestige Cromwell Road (#litres_trial_promo) store in London as to what they most wanted from a supermarket, they put their fingers very accurately on our supermarkets’ shortcomings. They said they wanted ‘very fresh produce, in season, that reawakened their interest in food’; in other words, the opposite of what they usually get from supermarkets, which is unripe, low-risk, far-travelled unseasonal produce that deadens any instinct to cook.

Chef Dennis Cotter (#litres_trial_promo) astutely summed up consumers’ alienation with supermarket fruit and vegetables as follows:

Peaches, tomatoes, avocados, asparagus, broad beans, sugar snap peas, parsnips, leeks, aubergines, sweet peppers, apples, pears … these are extraordinary foods that can give us unique pleasure. Ironically, the more poor imitations we eat, the less pleasure we take. For many of us, the pleasure associated with these wonderful foods has been gradually replaced in our minds by a dull, nagging ordinariness bordering on disappointment, and ultimately we forget they were ever wonderful. When the foods have finally been reduced to ordinariness, we can pass them in the supermarket aisles without even noticing them.

The problem isn’t just the never-changing produce that is on the shelves but what ought to be there yet strangely isn’t. Our fellow Europeans expect that the lion’s share of produce in their shops and markets will be home produce, coming from identifiable native regions, or at least sold under a generic national label. In Italy, you’ll see produce marked ‘nostrano’ – literally ‘local’, a point of fact, but also a statement of pride, evidence of a country with a thriving horticulture. The French use the tag ‘pays’ in the same way. To visiting European nationals, accustomed to buying overwhelmingly their own country’s produce and only a small proportion of imported lines, UK supermarket shelves must seem positively outlandish. Bizarrely, it is actually easier these days to buy a tropical passion fruit in a British supermarket than it is to buy an English apple. Friends of the Earth (#litres_trial_promo) found that even at the height of the British 2002 apple season, more than half the apples on sale in major supermarkets were imported. When it carried out the same survey for the 2003 harvest, it found that matters were even worse. The average proportion of UK-grown apples sold in Tesco and Asda stores was 38 per cent. I asked fruit growers why UK fruit was so poorly represented. ‘supermarkets can’t be hassled with UK fruit, 300 boxes here, 400 boxes there. They can’t even be bothered switching on the computer for that,’ one grower told me. ‘Even companies with turn-overs of £2–3 million are seen as too small to bother with. Supermarkets just want to deal with multinational conglomerates,’ said another.

Herbs are another striking example of supermarkets’ preference for doing business with major players – even if they are thousands of miles away. Almost all the herbs on sale in UK supermarkets come from Israel where big horticultural companies can guarantee a year-round supply. Yet several popular culinary herbs such as thyme, rosemary and bay grow all year round in the UK. Others such as chives, sage, mint, rocket and parsley will grow in the UK for a good six months of the year. It is really only the most tender, sun-seeking herbs like basil and coriander that are problematic for our climate. If supermarkets were committed to supporting British production, they could sell British herbs when available and supplement them with ones from abroad only as necessary. When the UK supply is limited, there are many European countries that produce fine herbs. Cyprus, for example, produces a steady flow of top-class parsley and coriander, while Italy has fields of pungent basil throughout the milder months. But it is administratively much easier for our big food retailers to strike a deal with an Israeli consortium for a 365-days-a-year supply.

The sorry state of many less robust supermarket vegetables is an obvious consequence of supermarkets’ preparedness to defy local, even European, seasons and source globally at the drop of a hat. Once unwrapped at home, and no longer under flattering produce lighting, these items are likely to resemble airport-weary, jet-lagged travellers. Much supermarket produce never tastes of anything much because it has been harvested prematurely to stop it deteriorating during transportation and on the shelf. Although the big chains all like to make great play of their sophisticated cold chains which theoretically permit all kinds of fragile produce to be transported thousands of miles yet taste as good as when it was picked, the fact is that however much our supermarkets might wish it, fresh produce simply doesn’t travel well. No surprise then that consumers are encouraged by supermarkets to shop with the eyes only, all other senses suspended. Smells that might inform the foreign shopper about ripeness, in melons or peaches say, are outlawed. They don’t fit in with ‘aroma management’ (#litres_trial_promo), the aim of which is to have a uniform smell throughout the store, save for the come-on smells of the instore bakery. Indeed aromas raise a dangerous spectre whose existence UK supermarkets deny: of seasonality, living material in a constant state of flux, development and decay.

One strawberry grower explained to me that he routinely picked strawberries destined for supermarkets one or two days earlier than those that would be sold in his farm shop. They were less red, less ripe and less sweet to start with, he said, and supermarket chilling methods would not improve them any further. But that’s how the supermarkets liked them. Another strawberry grower gave me this vivid illustration of how supermarket distribution methods actually get in the way of freshness and flavour:

When we used to sell our strawberries through wholesale markets they were much fresher. We’d pick all day Friday, for example, a lorry would collect them at 7 p.m. and they’d be in Covent Garden by 9.30 p.m. From there they’d be delivered overnight to secondary wholesale markets all over the UK and they’d be on sale in greengrocers the next morning. Now the supermarkets insist on a 10.30 a.m. pick-up which means that berries picked on a Friday have to be put in cold store overnight. They won’t usually get to the central receiving depot until later on Saturday afternoon where they need to be re-apportioned to all the stores and sent out again, probably on the Sunday. The supermarkets have actually lengthened the time between picking and consumption.

Or, as one Lewisham stallholder (#litres_trial_promo) put it rather more bluntly to a reporter from Virgin.net: ‘The gear on my stall came from Covent Garden at five this morning. It was almost certainly in the ground yesterday morning. We don’t need cold rooms like supermarkets do, we sell the stuff the same day or sling it. Do supermarkets get their stuff delivered fresh from the market every morning and replace it after hours? Like fuck they do.’

One ex-supermarket supplier told me that he sincerely believed that many younger people who only shop in supermarkets have never seen true freshness.

The supermarkets say that their spinach is cut, bagged, labelled, sent cooled to a regional distribution centre then to the store, all within twenty-four hours. That’s the theory. In practice, you wait for an unpredictable-sized order to arrive at 10 a.m. You can’t afford to let the supermarket down so you keep a least a day’s supply in cold store just in case the order is bigger than you estimated it would be, so instantly adding twenty-four hours’ life. For a Monday order, you harvest on a Friday. The packhouse will probably bag it on the Tuesday. Spinach can be at least five days old by the time it’s on the shelf and then it will have a further three days ‘use by’ date on it.

Premature picking and over-refrigeration are not the only devices supermarkets employ to create the impression of true freshness, while simultaneously stretching shelf life to its limits. Selecting out certain problematic lines is another. Leeks, for example, are now routinely sold ‘de-flagged’, without their green stalks. The supermarket justification for this is that shoppers don’t have the time or inclination for green flags any longer because they might contain some soil and need to be cleaned. The real reason is that if you leave them on, your leeks look older and sadder more quickly. So it is better for our supermarkets just to whack the flags off and present the de-flagging as a helping hand towards convenience and easing the pressure of modern life. Add to that the advantage that the leeks can be made to fill exactly the shelf space allocated to them. Whole celery is becoming harder to buy. Supermarkets would really prefer to have growers dump the outer stalks and just sell packs of heads because they have a longer shelf life. If they were to sell large-leaf British spinach loose, it would need to be sold in one or two days if it was not to look past its best. So supermarkets have simply stopped stocking large leaf spinach, replacing it with infinitely more expensive baby-leaf spinach, often sold in pillow packs so as to artificially extend its shelf life. As any cook can tell you, the typical supermarket 20 gram pack of herbs is pretty useless. What cooks need is decent-sized bunches. But if you sell herbs in a sparkly stiff plastic carton, most of which is covered by a label, even tired and flaccid herbs can be given the illusion of freshness. Minimally wrapped fresh herb bunches, on the other hand, give a more accurate indication of their age.

To sell really fresh leafy vegetables or herbs successfully, you need experienced greengrocers actively working to achieve a good turnaround. But such expertise is scarce in supermarkets. Store managers simply accept consignments of commodities pre-groomed to reduce all possible risk of spoilage. This skills-and-experience deficit extends to part-time shelf-stackers who are not expected to know whether a Jersey Royal is a potato, a breed of cow or a Channel Island monarch. Further up the horticultural buying chain, there is also a vacuum where experience should be. An importer of Italian salads told me of his experience visiting one of the large supermarkets with samples. ‘I met their boss man for fresh produce. He said he was looking to source something a bit different and I showed him a head of trevisse [a red chicory, common in Italy, similar to radicchio but naturally pointed in shape]. ‘‘Obviously they must grow these in tubes to get them to grow into this shape,’’ he said. He was so ignorant, I couldn’t be bothered answering him.’ An English fruit grower told me how one supermarket chain rejected a pre-agreed consignment of Worcester Pearmain apples because they were not round enough. ‘The quality controller didn’t know that this variety of apple is naturally a bit pear-shaped – hence the name. Help, we thought. They don’t know this but they are dealing with our produce!’

The only relief from the standardised tedium of supermarket produce comes in the form of speciality ranges of fruit and vegetables that appear to have more going for them. Complaints about pink sludge supermarket tomatoes, aptly named ‘Wasser-bomben’ in Germany, prompted the introduction of ‘flavour-grown’ varieties. These ‘better-than-the-rest’ ranges are in themselves an admission that the standard supermarket tomato is grown to satisfy other non-taste criteria. 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 (#ulink_75f6dd6f-aeea-562b-bc92-c772a9845995)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 such as haddock, cod, whiting and so on, there are various grades on offer at a fish auction. This is done not by size but by age: the freshest fish commands the highest price. ‘The supermarkets buy the poorer quality fish because they consider the best fish is too expensive. The reason why many of their fillets often contain bones is because they like to buy ‘‘block’’ fish, that’s cheaper fish that have been filleted at speed. It’s hard to see why supermarkets buy fish from all over the world to sell fresh when they can’t even sell fish from the UK fresh,’ he remarked.

One young, enthusiastic Surrey fishmonger, Rex Goldsmith (#litres_trial_promo), gave me an insight into the difference between fish from the independent fish trade and that from supermarkets. ‘I drum into my assistant, ‘‘If you wouldn’t buy it – don’t sell it.’’ I always go for quality,’ he told me. On a sunny spring day, the selection on his slab was as vibrantly fresh as the weather: Whitstable oysters, Cornish cod, brill, skate, sole, Scottish mussels, south-coast line-caught sea bass and west coast scallops. None of it had been frozen. It was the sort of selection that gives you ideas and inspires you to cook.