when Tesco’s profits hit the £2 billion mark, but really it shouldn’t have come as such a shock. Supermarkets, and the industrial food systems that supply them, have been making themselves indispensable to us for almost a century – it is only now that they have achieved their aim that we are starting to worry about the consequences. In 2006, an all-party parliamentary committee report entitled
High Street Britain 2015
stated: ‘There is widespread belief … that many small shops across the UK will have ceased trading by 2015, with few independent businesses taking their place. Their loss, largely the result of a heavily unbalanced trading environment, will damage the UK socially, economically and environmentally.’ 6 The report went on to recommend ‘a moratorium on further mergers and takeovers until the government has brought forward proposals to secure the diversity and vitality of the retail sector’. It might just as well have said ‘Lock the stable door and start looking for the horse.’
The disappearance of independent food shops in Britain has finally brought the state of the grocery trade to public attention, but it is just the visible tip of a very large iceberg. We might not like the corporate takeover of our high streets, but we absolutely love being able to buy fresh salmon or ready-made lasagne from a Tesco Metro or aSainsbury’s Local at eleven o’clock at night, seven days a week. It suits our modern lifestyles. The processes that make it possible – that can conjure up a salmon from a Scottish loch, gut it, package it, and dispatch it so that it arrives in perfect condition at the same time as a lasagne with a totally different provenance – are little short of miraculous. The ability to do it, cheaply and reliably, week in, week out, in the middle of the night and out of season, is what sets supermarkets apart. Their real power lies not in their takeover of the high street, but in their control of the food supply chain. That particular horse bolted long ago.
We’re so wedded to the year-round availability of just about everything – what the food journalist Joanna Blythman calls ‘permanent global summertime’ – that we tend to forget the phenomenal effort that it takes to bring it to us. 7 The logistics would be daunting enough were we just talking about tennis balls. Given that it’s food, they become positively mind-boggling. Food isn’t something one would naturally choose to transport very far. It is organic in the old-fashioned sense of the word, which means it goes off rather quickly unless subjected to some sort of preservation process such as drying, salting, smoking, canning, bottling, freezing, gassing or irradiating. Such processes do have their uses – champagne, cheese, bacon and kippers being some of the tastier ones – but in an ideal world, one would not salt food or blast it with gas simply in order to preserve it. One would harvest or butcher it, cook it as necessary and put it in one’s mouth – which, give or take a custom or two, is how rural communities have eaten for centuries. But getting food into cities is quite another matter. Apart from its tendency to go off, food is seasonal, squashable, bruiseable, unpredictable, irregular – the list goes on. The success of the modern food industry lies in its ability not just to provide us with hitherto unimaginable quantities of food, but to deliver it in good, or at least edible, condition. Most of it doesn’t taste as nice as it might have done straight out of the ground, but since most of us rarely eat really fresh food, we’ve forgotten what it’s supposed to taste like anyway.
One of the ways in which supermarkets manage to keep us supplied with fresh food is by stretching the concept of what counts as ‘fresh’.New Zealand lamb, for instance, used to be shipped to Britain frozen, but is now shipped ‘chilled’, sealed in containers at minus one degree Centigrade filled with a ‘gas flush’ (an
High Street Britain 2015
stated: ‘There is widespread belief … that many small shops across the UK will have ceased trading by 2015, with few independent businesses taking their place. Their loss, largely the result of a heavily unbalanced trading environment, will damage the UK socially, economically and environmentally.’ 6 The report went on to recommend ‘a moratorium on further mergers and takeovers until the government has brought forward proposals to secure the diversity and vitality of the retail sector’. It might just as well have said ‘Lock the stable door and start looking for the horse.’
The disappearance of independent food shops in Britain has finally brought the state of the grocery trade to public attention, but it is just the visible tip of a very large iceberg. We might not like the corporate takeover of our high streets, but we absolutely love being able to buy fresh salmon or ready-made lasagne from a Tesco Metro or aSainsbury’s Local at eleven o’clock at night, seven days a week. It suits our modern lifestyles. The processes that make it possible – that can conjure up a salmon from a Scottish loch, gut it, package it, and dispatch it so that it arrives in perfect condition at the same time as a lasagne with a totally different provenance – are little short of miraculous. The ability to do it, cheaply and reliably, week in, week out, in the middle of the night and out of season, is what sets supermarkets apart. Their real power lies not in their takeover of the high street, but in their control of the food supply chain. That particular horse bolted long ago.
We’re so wedded to the year-round availability of just about everything – what the food journalist Joanna Blythman calls ‘permanent global summertime’ – that we tend to forget the phenomenal effort that it takes to bring it to us. 7 The logistics would be daunting enough were we just talking about tennis balls. Given that it’s food, they become positively mind-boggling. Food isn’t something one would naturally choose to transport very far. It is organic in the old-fashioned sense of the word, which means it goes off rather quickly unless subjected to some sort of preservation process such as drying, salting, smoking, canning, bottling, freezing, gassing or irradiating. Such processes do have their uses – champagne, cheese, bacon and kippers being some of the tastier ones – but in an ideal world, one would not salt food or blast it with gas simply in order to preserve it. One would harvest or butcher it, cook it as necessary and put it in one’s mouth – which, give or take a custom or two, is how rural communities have eaten for centuries. But getting food into cities is quite another matter. Apart from its tendency to go off, food is seasonal, squashable, bruiseable, unpredictable, irregular – the list goes on. The success of the modern food industry lies in its ability not just to provide us with hitherto unimaginable quantities of food, but to deliver it in good, or at least edible, condition. Most of it doesn’t taste as nice as it might have done straight out of the ground, but since most of us rarely eat really fresh food, we’ve forgotten what it’s supposed to taste like anyway.
One of the ways in which supermarkets manage to keep us supplied with fresh food is by stretching the concept of what counts as ‘fresh’.New Zealand lamb, for instance, used to be shipped to Britain frozen, but is now shipped ‘chilled’, sealed in containers at minus one degree Centigrade filled with a ‘gas flush’ (an
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