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.
If you habitually shop in one supermarket chain for ready meals, you might occasionally wonder if you are missing out on variety by not trying out rival chains’ offerings. Don’t. There’s a very, very strong chance that despite being sold by different chains, the contents of those boxes will resemble one another closely.
Carry out a ‘tried and tasted’ comparison – a popular consumer journalism exercise which attempts to compare the relative contents of various supermarket chains’ boxed offerings – and the resemblance between the appealingly packaged ready meals that line our supermarket shelves is striking. In 2003, Asian food expert Ken Hom carried out precisely such a test on supermarket Thai green curry, sampling those sold by Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Somerfield and Marks & Spencer. The parameters of tried-and-tested features are often skewed towards supermarkets – a reflection of their grip on the nation’s psyche: usually only supermarket samples are tested, and no restaurant or home-made samples are included in the comparison. Such features demand that there must be winners and losers. An internal hierarchy must be established, even if the entire category is lacking in merit. But the results in this particular taste test were more candid than usual. They spoke volumes about the homogeneity of supermarket food.
