enhance the impression of astounding choice throughout their stores, they stock as many different types of fruit and vegetables as possible.
PGST may look good, but in the name of consumer choice and public health the irregularity and diversity that is part of the natural order has been eliminated, not to benefit consumers but to fit the way our big food retailers like to do business. In essence, this way means sourcing vast quantities of easy-to-retail, long shelf-life standard varieties, grown to rigid size and cosmetic specifications, that can be supplied 365 days a year. ‘Quality in supermarket terms means a constant supply of produce that matches their stereotype in terms of shape, size and colour,’ one packer told me. ‘It must have acceptable sugar and pressure levels and mustn’t taste actively unpleasant. Hi-tech, low-taste, odour-free produce is the norm.’
That is why supermarkets have made produce shopping a routine, uninspiring experience, effectively turning shoppers into robotic Stepford Wives, loading up their trolleys each week with identikit purchases. No wonder the nation’s fruit and vegetable consumption is declining. Eating ‘five a day’ is indeed a daunting and unrewarding mission if you shop in a supermarket selling Midwich Cuckoo-style produce. And in practical terms, by fostering the concept of the one-stop, weekly shop, supermarkets have drastically reduced the opportunities we have to purchase fruit and vegetables of any kind. Many consumers have simply given up buying pricey items such as plums, strawberries, peaches and apricots entirely because they are such a dismal let-down. The frisson of excitement that true seasonality provides, and the appetite-whetting response it should generate, are absent. Inspiration is shrivelled, for example, by the stultifying knowledge that whether it’s March, July or November, you will always find grapes in the middle of gondola three, on aisle number two, and they will always be Thomson Seedless. As food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall put it, ‘The downside of the culture of infinite year round choice is a kind of options paralysis: there’s so much on offer you don’t know where to start. Understanding the seasons brings a sense of structure, rhythm and rightness to your shopping and cooking. In a world where the methods of food production are rapidly unravelling into madness, seasonality is sanity, offering the best and quickest solution to the never-ending question: what shall I cook today?’ Shoppers no longer see onetime supermarket novelty breakthroughs such as iceberg lettuce, fine green beans, baby corn and mangetouts as a welcome relief from the limitations of native seasonal vegetables. Instead their ubiquity has made them perpetual clichés, a larger-than-life reminder of supermarkets’ obsession with creating a new agricultural world order where the sun always shines. When Sainsbury’s canvassed shoppers in its prestige Cromwell Road store in London as to what they most wanted from a supermarket, they put their fingers very accurately on our supermarkets’ shortcomings. They said they wanted ‘very fresh produce, in season, that reawakened their interest in food’; in other words, the opposite of what they usually get from supermarkets, which is unripe, low-risk, far-travelled unseasonal produce that deadens any instinct to cook.
Chef Dennis Cotter astutely summed up consumers’ alienation with supermarket fruit and vegetables as follows:
Peaches, tomatoes, avocados, asparagus, broad beans, sugar snap peas, parsnips, leeks, aubergines, sweet peppers, apples, pears … these are extraordinary foods that can give us unique pleasure. Ironically, the more poor imitations we eat, the less pleasure we take. For many of us, the pleasure associated with these wonderful foods has been gradually replaced in our minds by a dull, nagging ordinariness bordering on disappointment, and ultimately we forget they were ever wonderful. When the foods have finally been reduced to ordinariness, we can pass them in the supermarket aisles without even noticing them.
The problem isn’t just the never-changing produce that is on the shelves but what ought to be there yet strangely isn’t. Our fellow Europeans expect that the lion’s share of produce in their shops and markets will be home produce, coming from identifiable native regions, or at least sold under a generic national label. In Italy, you’ll see produce marked ‘nostrano’ – literally ‘local’, a point of fact, but also a statement of pride, evidence of a country with a thriving horticulture. The French use the tag ‘pays’ in the same way. To visiting European nationals, accustomed to buying overwhelmingly their own country’s produce and only a small proportion of imported lines, UK supermarket shelves must seem positively outlandish. Bizarrely, it is actually easier these days to buy a tropical passion fruit in a British supermarket than it is to buy an English apple. Friends of the Earth found that even at the height of the British 2002 apple season, more than half the apples on sale in major supermarkets were imported. When it carried out the same survey for the 2003 harvest, it found that matters were even worse. The average proportion of UK-grown apples sold in Tesco and Asda stores was 38 per cent. I asked fruit growers why UK fruit was so poorly represented. ‘supermarkets can’t be hassled with UK fruit, 300 boxes here, 400 boxes there. They can’t even be bothered switching on the computer for that,’ one grower told me. ‘Even companies with turn-overs of £2–3 million are seen as too small to bother with. Supermarkets just want to deal with multinational conglomerates,’ said another.
Herbs are another striking example of supermarkets’ preference for doing business with major players – even if they are thousands of miles away. Almost all the herbs on sale in UK supermarkets come from Israel where big horticultural companies can guarantee a year-round supply. Yet several popular culinary herbs such as thyme, rosemary and bay grow all year round in the UK. Others such as chives, sage, mint, rocket and parsley will grow in the UK for a good six months of the year. It is really only the most tender, sun-seeking herbs like basil and coriander that are problematic for our climate. If supermarkets were committed to supporting British production, they could sell British herbs when available and supplement them with ones from abroad only as necessary. When the UK supply is limited, there are many European countries that produce fine herbs. Cyprus, for example, produces a steady flow of top-class parsley and coriander, while Italy has fields of pungent basil throughout the milder months. But it is administratively much easier for our big food retailers to strike a deal with an Israeli consortium for a 365-days-a-year supply.
The sorry state of many less robust supermarket vegetables is an obvious consequence of supermarkets’ preparedness to defy local, even European, seasons and source globally at the drop of a hat. Once unwrapped at home, and no longer under flattering produce lighting, these items are likely to resemble airport-weary, jet-lagged travellers. Much supermarket produce never tastes of anything much because it has been harvested prematurely to stop it deteriorating during transportation and on the shelf. Although the big chains all like to make great play of their sophisticated cold chains which theoretically permit all kinds of fragile produce to be transported thousands of miles yet taste as good as when it was picked, the fact is that however much our supermarkets might wish it, fresh produce simply doesn’t travel well. No surprise then that consumers are encouraged by supermarkets to shop with the eyes only, all other senses suspended. Smells that might inform the foreign shopper about ripeness, in melons or peaches say, are outlawed. They don’t fit in with ‘aroma management’, the aim of which is to have a uniform smell throughout the store, save for the come-on smells of the instore bakery. Indeed aromas raise a dangerous spectre whose existence UK supermarkets deny: of seasonality, living material in a constant state of flux, development and decay.
One strawberry grower explained to me that he routinely picked strawberries destined for supermarkets one or two days earlier than those that would be sold in his farm shop. They were less red, less ripe and less sweet to start with, he said, and supermarket chilling methods would not improve them any further. But that’s how the supermarkets liked them. Another strawberry grower gave me this vivid illustration of how supermarket distribution methods actually get in the way of freshness and flavour:
When we used to sell our strawberries through wholesale markets they were much fresher. We’d
