Supermarkets

Buying your food anywhere else but a supermarket is ‘middle class’, ‘elitist’ & ‘impractical’ I’m told.  Often.  Because supermarkets sell cheap food and cheap food, especially in these tough times, is a necessity for millions of people. Discussions about the food system – who profits, who doesn’t – are cut off with sneering accusations about my ‘middle-classness’. (Yes.  I am now.  I wasn’t when I started out. Thank you, Atlee and Bevan.) It’s easy for you, they say, you’ve got the money to shop at farmers’ markets or buy from an organic box scheme or at delis or greengrocers or even (oddly!) streetmarkets. 

That’s all true.  But whether living on a tight budget (at university in Leicester, in my first three years in NY City, in Edinburgh and in Christchurch, NZ) or comfortably off, as I am now, I’ve always shopped in the same way.  I learned young.  There was only one kind of person my generous and gregarious mother couldn’t abide: those who spent money for show – a new fridge, car or curtains – and skimped on food. All fur coat and no knickers, she’d say. She didn’t have much money (she was a cotton weaver, my dad a barber) but she knew how to shop and cook. Yet even now, in spite of droves of telly chefs, one of the largest cookbook publishing industries in the world and the success of magazines like this one, we’re still mostly a nation that rates cars, tvs, sound systems and sofas well above what we put on our plates. 

And supermarkets know it.  If food is just your means to an end, supermarkets are perfect.  You can shop wisely there but few of us do. We fall for their wiles. I fell in love with them early on – a short affair with the A & P (one of the biggest US chains) in Bloomington, Indiana, in the late 60s.  My first supermarket.  That was an Aladdin’s cave – a place of wonders. Cardboard tubes in the dairy cabinet that you twisted open to disgorge neat, scone-like ‘biscuits’ (as Americans call them) that you put on a baking tray, popped in the oven and 12 minutes later became delicious breakfast buns.  Whipped cream in aerosol cans. In the freezer more cardboard tubes of concentrated orange and lemon juice.  And in the long aisle of tinned veg: hearts of palm!  I still have my cooking notebook from that time and under ‘easy first courses’ I wrote that they should be dressed with a lemon vinaigrette into which “lots” of parsley has been stirred.  Neither my local Morrison’s nor Waitrose seem to do hearts of palm in 2013.  Might be because you have to cut down a whole tree to get that heart.  I didn’t know that in Indiana in 1969.

I’m now, decades into food journalism, mostly illusion free about what our Aladdin’s caves have to offer but what raises my stress levels is the continuing, nation-wide naivete about supermarkets and the prices they charge. If you cook (that’s the important proviso) how cheap is it?  For raw ingredients, not very.   And what is cheap has, to a great degree, been subsidised by other people.  First, by the large percentage of staff getting minimum wage (or just over it) who need their incomes supplemented by state benefits (ie, you and me as tax payers) to achieve a liveable income.  And second, by the suppliers–they pay for having their produce on the best shelf (at eye level) or in the end-of-aisle special displays. They also pay for the 2-for-1 offers and often for the produce on discount. And there’s a murky world of payments – demands from stores for £50,000 here, £20,000 there – to stock goods. Producers tell journalists about such payments ‘off the record’ but can’t talk about it publicly because they’ll be delisted.  Hundreds, thousands, of dairy and pig farmers have been driven out of business by low prices offered by retailers who can buy globally where labour is cheapest and animal welfare a low priority.  The horsemeat scandal didn’t come out of the blue.

It’s also why we’ve lost so many small fruit and veg growers. Some simply going out of business, some bought out by the big guys. Supermarkets make some of their largest profits on fruit and vegetables, which is why, 98% of the time, you’ll find them a lot cheaper at a street market, greengrocer or farm-shop.

There are other prices to pay besides the one on the shelf edge– and we’re all paying them. And it’s not idle, privileged, middle-class chit-chat to say so.