Читать книгу Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets - Joanna Blythman, Joanna Blythman - Страница 15

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 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, 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.

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 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 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, 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 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.

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; 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 … 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 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, 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 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):

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, 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.