meals, three times more than any other country in Europe. Spending on these is set to soar to £5 billion per year by 2007. Cultural commentator Jonathan Meades once said that supermarkets have thrived on what he calls ‘the British indifference to flavour, freshness and quality, the British preoccupation with the appearance of foodstuffs, the British insistence on choice’. How right he was.
Hardly a week goes by without another reminder that British eating habits are in decline: a survey, or new research, providing more evidence to confirm that we seem to have become a culinarily clueless country, simultaneously overfed yet undernourished, intent on fattening ourselves up on junk in preparation for an early grave. The 2001–2002 government Expenditure and Food Survey was one such reminder. In a nutshell, this snapshot of national eating habits showed that consumption of fresh, raw, unprocessed food had declined within a year, for example fish (−4 per cent) and green vegetables (−7 per cent), while that of processed food was up, chips for instance +6 per cent and processed meats +3.5 per cent.
When consumers are making a beeline for reheatable baked potato instead of baking a fresh one themselves, or selecting a plastic carton filled with mass-produced cauliflower cheese for two instead of a fresh cauliflower, milk and cheese, is this just more confirmation that the UK is, as cultural commentator Jonathan Meades has suggested, ‘a country with a collectively defective palate’, or does it have something to do with the way we shop?
It could simply be coincidence that the UK’s vegetable consumption, for example, has declined by almost a third since the 1960s, just as the supermarkets’ retail dominance has grown. Supermarkets would doubtless tell us that this dramatic decline has nothing to do with them. When such worrying trends in UK food consumption surface, our large retailers, even though they supply the bulk of the nation’s shopping basket, are always prominent in the rush to distance themselves from any culpability, presenting themselves instead as the purveyors of solutions. After all, supermarkets regularly take credit for giving consumers a wider, more enticing range of vegetables than ever before. Who, they boast, had ever heard of mangetouts or baby corn before the supermarkets came on the scene?
In fact supermarkets positively fall over each other in the stampede to tell us how they are doing their bit to improve the nation’s diet. If we are turning into a nation of hypertensive fatties, it is nothing whatsoever to do with what they sell. Their public relations departments issue upbeat and paternalistic press releases telling us how they are filling their shelves with prominently labelled healthy-eating options, helpfully marketing small fruits in child-friendly packaging and so on. They like to be seen as crusaders for top-quality, fresh, healthy food for everyone. In January 2003, for example, Asda claimed that it had taken 1,000 tonnes of salt out of its own-label food products in the preceding four years and pledged to take a further 10 per cent out by the end of 2004. Somewhat embarrassingly, six months later, Asda was indirectly criticised by the Food Standards Agency for loading some of its healthy eating lines with salt. An Asda Good For You lasagne contained 60 per cent of the recommended daily salt intake for an adult. Asda’s ‘Good For You’ korma with rice contained 55 per cent. Popular Asda own-label children’s meals – spaghetti with meatballs, shepherd’s pie and macaroni cheese – contained 48 per cent, 46 per cent and 42 per cent respectively of a child’s recommended intake. If this was an improvement, how much salt had they contained in previous years?
Usually there are strings attached to supermarkets’ championing of public health. Often their healthy-eating initiatives are little more than unsubtly disguised self-promotion exercises with a commercial pay-off. In 2003, for example, Sainsbury’s launched a scheme in conjunction with the NHS, where GPs would refer overweight patients to the nearest Sainsbury’s for a guided healthy-eating tour. Staff would ‘point out low fat versions of popular foods, such as ready meals, as well as focusing on cheaper products such as tinned fruit and frozen vegetables’. In a similar initiative, groups of schoolchildren were invited to visit their local Sainsbury’s, where a team of trained food advisers and registered dieticians would ‘talk to them about the various food groups and how they can choose the best foods to keep them healthy’. Sainsbury’s free fruit in schools also sounded like a commendable initiative until you learnt that this was teamed with ‘fruitastic store tours’ run by Sainsbury’s advisers. The message might be ‘Eat more fruit’, but the missing strapline was ‘and make sure you buy it in Sainsbury’s’.
In one such initiative by Waitrose, this message was made explicit. It sponsors the Kid’s Cookery School (KCS), a charity that encourages children to cook. KCS offers paying cookery workshops with some free places for children from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’, which have included workshops run by Waitrose staff, focused around visits to Waitrose stores. In the summer of 2002, KCS ran a two-day sponsored extravaganza during which children toured Waitrose and KCS’s principal and chief executive held free workshops for children ‘to promote the fantastic range of fruits and vegetables that Waitrose stock’. Likewise every sheet sent out free to schools as part of Waitrose’s Food Explorers ‘education packs’ carries the prominent flag/logo – some would say advert – Waitrose@school.
Children figure prominently in supermarket healthy-eating drives. The food industry has fostered the concept of separate children’s food as a distinct category from adult food and this has created a whole new gravy train for retailers. As well as Waitrose several other supermarkets have come up with special ranges. Somerfield has the Funky Food Factory, Sainsbury’s offers the Blue Parrot Café, Safeway has its KIDS ‘I’d like …’ range and Waitrose has Food Explorers. Viewed charitably, these healthy-eating drives are sincere, if misguided, attempts to offer healthier food that appeals to children. Viewed cynically, they are efforts to exploit parents who worry about what their offspring eat by developing highly profitable added-value lines. The ranges comprise a selection of items with distinctly different merits. All include small fruits in special packaging. When I checked Waitrose’s offerings in November 2003, Food Explorers bananas cost 19.8 pence each while ordinary small bananas cost 17.9 pence each. This premium charged for Food Explorers was repeated with ‘easy peel’ Clementines. Mini-clementines in the Food Explorers range cost 96 pence per pound while ordinary clementines, larger in size, cost 90 pence per pound. That same month, a Friends of the Earth survey found that in Tesco ‘Kids Snack Pack Carrots’ were on sale at thirteen times the price of Value carrots, a trend repeated at Asda where ‘Snack Pack Carrot Crunchies’ cost ten times more than loose carrots.
When it comes to processed food in children’s ranges, the chains are very careful about what claims they make, the operative word being healthier as opposed to healthy. The Funky Food Factory components contain ‘a minimum of additives’ and levels of salt and sugar are ‘carefully controlled’. The Blue Parrot Café guarantees ‘controlled fat, restricted colours, no preservatives and no added flavour enhancers’. Likewise Food Explorers ‘contains no artificial sweeteners, flavourings and colours’ and contains ‘controlled levels of fat, added sugar and salt’. Safeway says its KIDS ‘I’d like …’ range ‘has been developed within nutritional guidelines to contain controlled levels of fat, salt and sugar so you can rest assured they [children] are eating healthier, nutritionally balanced foods’. Favourites in this range include Chicken Ketchup Kievs, mini jam tarts and Cheese & Onion Sky Mix, described as ‘cheese and onion flavour 3D moon, star and planet-shaped potato, wheat and rice snacks’.
What supermarkets are aiming for in children’s ranges is to provide a tick list of apparently healthy components which encourages
