foods, often embracing lines which, in any other context, would look like junk. The labelling often seeks to make a major virtue out of every slight improvement. What they should really say on the label is ‘Better than the standard food industry equivalent in some respect’, which is not saying a lot.
The Food Explorers range, for example, claims to be ‘good for children’. Adverts say ‘what may sound like kid’s junk food is, in fact, healthy food’. This reassuring guarantee, however, is applied to some surprising foods. Parents who thought they understood the basics of healthy eating might be at a loss to understand what was especially healthy about raspberry-ripple-flavoured water, toffee caramel balls breakfast cereal, chocolate chip cookies or toffee sauce. This last item – a Food Explorers ‘treat’ – is 65 per cent sugars, but it bears the reassuring label ‘25 per cent less fat than typical toffee sauce’. Many savoury Food Explorers lines are slightly adapted versions of ubiquitous supermarket ready meals such as chicken tikka, sweet and sour chicken, lasagne and shepherd’s pie which do little or nothing to extend the boundaries of children’s eating as their ‘Explorers’ title might imply. As food writer Lynda Brown put it:
The Food Explorers range is not a genuine effort to seriously tackle children’s nutrition, but primarily to wean kids and their mothers on processed food in jazzy packaging that has a bit less of the very ingredients causing problems in the first place. Either that, or they have the audacity to reinvent basic items like dried fruit as something specially designed for kids and charge handsomely for it. As a Waitrose shopper, I am personally very disappointed. There might be the odd okay item, but how on earth a supermarket chain which prides itself on a passion for food quality can think that their gloopy, sickly sweet toffee sauce has anything to do with good food or nutrition beats me. To call such foods a ‘treat’ is insulting their customer’s intelligence.
Sainsbury’s Blue Parrot Café range is promoted as ‘healthier food for kids … specially developed to deliver great taste with improved nutritional quality’. But nutritionists at the Food Commission, the independent food watchdog, were left scratching their heads over several items in the range, not least the blackcurrant-flavoured sparkling water drink.
You might expect that this product with its luscious pictures of blackcurrant fruit would contain enough blackcurrant juice to warrant Sainsbury’s on-pack advice: ‘A glass of fruit juice (150ml) counts towards your 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day’. No such luck. There is so little blackcurrant juice in this product, that a percentage is not even given, which according to food labelling law, indicates that there is so little blackcurrant juice in this bottle that it is simply there as a flavouring. And whilst the product contains some apple juice, sugar is the top ingredient after water.
was the Food Commission’s withering assessment.
Sainsbury’s interpretation of healthy eating advice has already ruffled feathers at the Department of Health. Along with Tesco and Somerfield, it has spurned the government’s five-a-day logo. Sainsbury’s says that the government logo is ‘too restrictive because it can only be applied to fresh fruit and vegetable products that have no added salt, fat or sugar’. All three chains have their own five-a-day logos, which allow a broader interpretation that can embrace processed food.
There is more than an element of poacher-turned-gamekeeper in supermarkets’ attitude to healthy eating, because the truth is that our large food retailers all make considerable profit out of selling over-processed, nutritionally debased, industrial food and have no intention of surrendering that in a benevolent mission to rescue the nation’s health. Their apparently high-minded aspirations are given the lie by the relative loading of what they actually sell.
Take a few minutes to walk the aisles of a typical supermarket and roughly measure for yourself how much aisle space is given to each broad category of food. You don’t need a tape measure for this exercise; paces will do. Then divide everything edible you see into two categories: first fresh, unprocessed raw ingredients, and then processed food. What will be instantly apparent is how the latter dwarfs the former. You will see that the space given to ready meals frequently outstrips that given to fresh meat and fish combined. Fruit and vegetables, despite being tactically located by the entrance to create the impression of a store bursting with healthy fresh produce, increasingly occupy less gondola (shelf) space than ready meals, crisps, snacks or fizzy drinks. In other words, the selection you see pushes you towards processed food and makes you feel less inclined to cook. In this respect, UK supermarkets are strikingly different from European ones. Phil Daoust, a writer who moved from London to Alsace, summed up the difference in the Guardian. ‘The other morning I went to the supermarket without any clear idea of what I was going to buy. In Britain I would have come away with some sort of pasta bake, a pork pie, perhaps a Thai-style stir fry. I left the Intermarché with potatoes, lamb’s lettuce, steaks and wine. That night my daughter and I ate steak au poivre, garlic mash and salad with a light vinaigrette.’ In Britain, fewer and fewer people cook, microwaves are being installed rather than ovens and some homes don’t have a table on which to eat any more. More people are going for the easy option, which contributes to them getting fatter and less healthy, and they are strongly encouraged to do that by the supermarket system.
One fresh chilled food supplier observed wryly that UK supermarkets would stop selling fresh unprocessed food entirely if they thought they could get away with it. ‘Whether it’s melons, milk or mince, fresh unprocessed food is just full of hassle. It’s a pain in the butt. It doesn’t look nice, it’s inconsistent, it takes a lot of management by the store. If it stays an extra day or two in depot, they’ve lost it because it’s past its best. The less fresh food they can do the better as far as they are concerned. They stock it because they have to, because people expect it.’
Supermarkets feed this expectation with specialist counters – fresh meat and fish, delicatessen, ‘food to go’, hot pies, ‘curry pots’, hot carvery, salad bar, etc. These support the illusion that supermarkets offer all the fresh food virtues of the traditional, more personalised marketplace or vibrant high street, more conveniently organised under one roof. Morrisons prominently names the aisle with these sections as ‘Market Street’. In some newer stores, Sainsbury’s tries to create a market feel with an area dedicated to specialist counters at the front of the store. In supermarket language, such counters are ‘hero departments’ because they have ‘pulling power’. They bring people into the store and create an excitement that aisle after aisle of standard grocery products can’t. They add ‘theatre’ or excitement to the supermarket shopping experience.
Some of these specialist counters are more convincing than others. Morrisons, for example, has staff in each store who make up salads daily for self-service salad bars. Asda, on the other hand, has counters which promise that pizza is ‘Freshly Made For You’, but in the Asda store I visited, ‘freshly made’ consisted of putting prepared toppings (chopped ham, grated cheese, pepperoni) on top of ready-made pizza bases, then shrink wrapping them. At one Safeway pizzeria counter I visited, the pizza oven had a log-effect oven which, to the casual passer-by, gave the impression of a traditional wood-fired oven. Staff behind the counter told me that although the dough could be rolled out into one of two sizes on the spot, it was not made on the premises.
Produce sections also provide supermarkets with an opportunity to create a healthy image and create a mini-high street feel. Launching Sainsbury’s 2003 ‘First For Fresh’ – a major overhaul of its produce presentation – the chain’s project manager explained that it was about ‘re-emphasising our excellence in fresh food to the consumer’. When customers first came in they would see
