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
