overnight to secondary wholesale markets all over the UK and they’d be on sale in greengrocers the next morning. Now the supermarkets insist on a 10.30 a.m. pick-up which means that berries picked on a Friday have to be put in cold store overnight. They won’t usually get to the central receiving depot until later on Saturday afternoon where they need to be re-apportioned to all the stores and sent out again, probably on the Sunday. The supermarkets have actually lengthened the time between picking and consumption.
Or, as one Lewisham stallholder put it rather more bluntly to a reporter from Virgin.net: ‘The gear on my stall came from Covent Garden at five this morning. It was almost certainly in the ground yesterday morning. We don’t need cold rooms like supermarkets do, we sell the stuff the same day or sling it. Do supermarkets get their stuff delivered fresh from the market every morning and replace it after hours? Like fuck they do.’
One ex-supermarket supplier told me that he sincerely believed that many younger people who only shop in supermarkets have never seen true freshness.
The supermarkets say that their spinach is cut, bagged, labelled, sent cooled to a regional distribution centre then to the store, all within twenty-four hours. That’s the theory. In practice, you wait for an unpredictable-sized order to arrive at 10 a.m. You can’t afford to let the supermarket down so you keep a least a day’s supply in cold store just in case the order is bigger than you estimated it would be, so instantly adding twenty-four hours’ life. For a Monday order, you harvest on a Friday. The packhouse will probably bag it on the Tuesday. Spinach can be at least five days old by the time it’s on the shelf and then it will have a further three days ‘use by’ date on it.
Premature picking and over-refrigeration are not the only devices supermarkets employ to create the impression of true freshness, while simultaneously stretching shelf life to its limits. Selecting out certain problematic lines is another. Leeks, for example, are now routinely sold ‘de-flagged’, without their green stalks. The supermarket justification for this is that shoppers don’t have the time or inclination for green flags any longer because they might contain some soil and need to be cleaned. The real reason is that if you leave them on, your leeks look older and sadder more quickly. So it is better for our supermarkets just to whack the flags off and present the de-flagging as a helping hand towards convenience and easing the pressure of modern life. Add to that the advantage that the leeks can be made to fill exactly the shelf space allocated to them. Whole celery is becoming harder to buy. Supermarkets would really prefer to have growers dump the outer stalks and just sell packs of heads because they have a longer shelf life. If they were to sell large-leaf British spinach loose, it would need to be sold in one or two days if it was not to look past its best. So supermarkets have simply stopped stocking large leaf spinach, replacing it with infinitely more expensive baby-leaf spinach, often sold in pillow packs so as to artificially extend its shelf life. As any cook can tell you, the typical supermarket 20 gram pack of herbs is pretty useless. What cooks need is decent-sized bunches. But if you sell herbs in a sparkly stiff plastic carton, most of which is covered by a label, even tired and flaccid herbs can be given the illusion of freshness. Minimally wrapped fresh herb bunches, on the other hand, give a more accurate indication of their age.
To sell really fresh leafy vegetables or herbs successfully, you need experienced greengrocers actively working to achieve a good turnaround. But such expertise is scarce in supermarkets. Store managers simply accept consignments of commodities pre-groomed to reduce all possible risk of spoilage. This skills-and-experience deficit extends to part-time shelf-stackers who are not expected to know whether a Jersey Royal is a potato, a breed of cow or a Channel Island monarch. Further up the horticultural buying chain, there is also a vacuum where experience should be. An importer of Italian salads told me of his experience visiting one of the large supermarkets with samples. ‘I met their boss man for fresh produce. He said he was looking to source something a bit different and I showed him a head of trevisse [a red chicory, common in Italy, similar to radicchio but naturally pointed in shape]. ‘‘Obviously they must grow these in tubes to get them to grow into this shape,’’ he said. He was so ignorant, I couldn’t be bothered answering him.’ An English fruit grower told me how one supermarket chain rejected a pre-agreed consignment of Worcester Pearmain apples because they were not round enough. ‘The quality controller didn’t know that this variety of apple is naturally a bit pear-shaped – hence the name. Help, we thought. They don’t know this but they are dealing with our produce!’
The only relief from the standardised tedium of supermarket produce comes in the form of speciality ranges of fruit and vegetables that appear to have more going for them. Complaints about pink sludge supermarket tomatoes, aptly named ‘Wasser-bomben’ in Germany, prompted the introduction of ‘flavour-grown’ varieties. These ‘better-than-the-rest’ ranges are in themselves an admission that the standard supermarket tomato is grown to satisfy other non-taste criteria. Now the concept has been extended to all manner of produce. Tesco’s Finest and Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference labels feature items such as sun-ripened Jamaican ortaniques, extra-sweet golden kiwis, Delizia tomatoes ‘grown in sandy soil to deliver this distinct, sweet flavour’ and bananas ‘left to ripen longer and grown exclusively on the tropical terraces of the Canaries’. In 2003 Waitrose launched a new fruit range packed in black and gold livery explicitly called ‘Perfectly Ripe’, consisting of up-market pears, stone fruit and tropical fruits such as mango and papaya that have been left to mature on the tree. These supermarket specialities cost substantially more than the standard equivalent and seek to make a virtue out of giving consumers what we always hoped we’d be getting anyway: ripe, fresh produce that actually tastes of something.
We are told by the government that we ought to be eating two portions of fish a week, but you can bet that very few supermarket shoppers manage that. When you are buying fish there are two important criteria that ought to be fulfilled. The paramount consideration is that the fish must be ultra-fresh. The secondary consideration is that the wider the changing daily selection of different species – ‘the catch of the day’ – the better. supermarkets toil to deliver on both fronts. Take processed products like smoked salmon or marinated herring out of the equation – these pad out the supermarket’s fish offering – and you’ll see just how little fresh, unprocessed fish is actually on offer. Any-one still lucky enough to have the comparative benchmark of a good independent fishmonger in their area cannot fail to be underwhelmed by the unexciting and lacklustre nature of the typical supermarket offering. Yet as fish expert William Black tactfully put it: ‘It’s to supermarkets that many of us have to turn, not always happily, for our regular supplies of fish.’ It is no surprise that the UK’s fish consumption is going down. The government’s 2001–2002 Expenditure and Food Survey showed that sales of fish had declined by 4 per cent within the year.
In smaller stores, the whole fish category is generally relegated to a blink-and-you’d-miss-it zone of shelf space. You’ll find fish in pre-packs sealed with ‘modified atmosphere’ (air that’s had its composition altered to artificially extend the shelf life of the product within it), under film so tough and so tight that until you get home and pierce it with a sharp knife you won’t have a clue whether the fish is, to your mind, fresh or not. Don’t have high expectations. Fresh fish goes through a dumb period when it is not actively ‘off’ or malodorous but not exactly full of the joys of the sea either. Fish in that state is what we are likely to get when we buy supermarket pre-packs. You’re likely to have the further frustration of being locked into the retailer’s idea of the typical ‘meal occasion’. Salmon steaks, for example, commonly come in packs of two, designed for the supermarket’s idea of a cosy dîner à deux. So what do you do if there are three or five people for dinner, or you live alone? Feed the surplus one to the cat?
In bigger supermarkets with a distinct
