Today's article in City AM's Forum is about Big Food, well worth a read:
BIG Food is... the polar opposite of good food. Big food companies, we are told by campaigners and celebrity chefs, produce poor quality, waistline-busting, environment-wrecking, small-farmer-bankrupting products. The supermarkets... destroy communities to sell rubbish to zombified shoppers. Industrial agriculture gives us nutrient-lite, flavourless, chemical-soaked food produced in a shockingly wasteful manner. Fast-food restaurants produce bland, homogenised, artery-clogging, street-littering meals...
Gimme Gimme Gimme
1 hour ago
15 comments:
I note the patronising assumption that the process of buying food (housewives going into one shop at a time) was "an almost daily chore". Who's to say that the people concerned didn't enjoy shopping, meeting their mates and having a good chat? Why should shopping for food be a chore, but other shopping (also "going into one shop at a time") not be? Anyway, unless you lived in a town, you only went shopping once a week.
B, based on a limited sample of me and the Mrs, I would prefer to go to the supermarket and get everything in one go than to traipse round different shops. And I don't like shopping generally.
Mrs W is a bit more nuanced;
- shopping for clothes is a leisure activity for her,
- she also prefers doing one big shop in the supermarket for 'essentials' than traipsing round (and she's quite happy to send me off with a detailed shopping list),
- unless it's a particular special item of food she wants from a particular specialist shop, but that is then "cooking as a hobby" and not "cooking to eat".
The kids also like going to the shops to get a magazine or a toy, but they hate the rest of it.
In olden times, there were far more shops in every village, and you didn't need to "go into town".
And for sure, people like meeting their friends, that's why we have pubs, sitting rooms, school gates, cafés etc.
"In olden times, there were far more shops in every village, and you didn't need to "go into town". "
People still tended to make the weekly expedition into town and even in the olden days, only about 50% of villages (at a guess) had shops. Also far more shops delivered (which the author doesn't point out). I can remember a baker, a butcher and a fishmonger who came round, also the milkman for dairy products, so the weekly shop had a fairly high "leisure" content.
There is also the common assumption in the article that people are freed up from "back-breaking jobs" to do something more fulfilling, when in reality they are actually freed up to go on the dole.
Finally, what is likely to happen to that 20% of income no longer spent on food? Is it not likely to work its way through to higher rents? Food production is cheaper because it is less labour-intensive, so the savings have come at the expense of jobs which is great if you are one of those still in work, but not so great if you are one of those put out of work by the greater "efficiency" of supermarkets.
I found it condescending tripe by someone trying to be oh so iconoclastic.
Interesting (but weak) use of the "Big Food" label associate with criticisms of Big Pharma, anyone who diosagrees must be a conspiracy theorist!
No more time to deconstruct, perhaps more later
B: "Finally, what is likely to happen to that 20% of income no longer spent on food? Is it not likely to work its way through to higher rents?"
Yes of course, housing costs are an ever rising share of the RPI shopping basket, as previously discussed, up from ten to twenty per cent over the past few decades.
"so the savings have come at the expense of jobs"
They may well have come "at expense of jobs in food" but not at expense of jobs generally, or shall we spend the rest of the day mourning typesetters, lamp lighters, men with red flags in front of cars, blacksmiths etc?
If you add together all such jobs which have more or less disappeared, that'd imply 90% unemployment today (which is clearly not the case).
We had smoked salmon salad last night, with the salmon courtesy of Messrs Aldi - the tatties and "leaves" were from our kitchen garden. On Tuesday night we had a spag bog - I've never had one elsewhere to match my beloved's. She cooks the sauce in large quantities, so we have lots frozen for the cold weather. We do not, however, make our own spaghetti: Tesco's does very well. :)
Tesco did very fine croissants until a few years ago when (I suppose) some fool changed the recipe. Waitrose really ought to do something about the feeble standard of their baking. (Wadders, I can write reams of this stuff. Just shout if you'd like some more.)
Several points. In re the 'expense of jobs' thingy. I think that's nonsense. The point of production isn't jobs, it's production. If we seek to maximise production will automatically maximise employment - all things being equal.
Secondly LVT is a necessary precurser to the availability of choice. e.g. In a local town near me Tesco wants to move in (there is already an excellent but modestly sized co-op supermarket) and there is a vibrant high street. tesco's aim is 'categpry killing'. At present it is as easy to go up and down the high street as it would be to go to Tesco. Tesco's site is large and will offer lots opf car parking, although there is already good carparking just off the high street. Would the LVT bill for Tescos be proportionally greater - it's presence adding more value to the land than the local shops? So eveing things out a bit.
And me I don't like shopping eaither. Well, except for the blokey stuff and most of that you can now do on-line. And I am a cooking fan. No that's a lie, I am an eating fan. So shopping for ingredients is not a chore.
D, I was enjoying that. Keep going, and bonus points if you manage to mention road kill.
L, agreed, we agreed an even better solution to the Tesco Problem a while ago (council buys the land, builds the supermarket and then rents it to Tesco, thus enabling it to chisel out any super-profits).
MW I do remember. Just adding to the debate for others. Funnily enough - come to think of it - I am pretty sure that the Council already owns some of the land and certainly the access.
L, furthermore, AFAIAA, while supermarkets build big car parks, the local council usually insists that it's "first two hours free" or something, so these car parks benefit all the other surrounding shops as well (and kids who use it for BMXing, skateboarding and so on).
I know it's not quite the point of the article, but Tesco transformed our shopping experience in this remote little part of the world both in terms of choice / quality / price and in terms of service / staff training.
A couple of local retailers went out of business but frankly, they deserved to. They were appalling and even their staunchest and most anti-Tesco supporters seem to have been staggered by the holistic (sorry!) nature of the Tesco offering which goes far beyond just food prices.
Somewhere to park, pleasant, roomy shop wander round, great choice, good prices, excellent, cheerful, polite service from kids and adults from whom expectations are made clear for the first time and who're paid better than minimum wage for the first time. Who're trained and valued. Management who listen and adopt the "Management By Wandering About" protocol and who get involved with using the premises for positive, pro-community, activities.
If we could get Tesco to take over the running of the local NHS Trust I suspect things might improve there, too.....
FT, that's exactly the point!
As it happens, they re-arranged our nearest Tesco and it's not as nice as it was*, but I suppose we'll get used to it.
* They made the shelves between the aisles much higher, which makes it seem a bit oppressive.
I don't think we can be bothered eating our own garden snails again. But we now see pheasant and partridge in our garden quite often. I suppose I should buy an air rifle.
Small shops were generally awful. Yes, some were brilliant, but a lot of them weren't.
My local baker's shop closed and I really couldn't have cared. 2 varieties of bread, not particularly fresh (brought in from a large baker), open 9 to 5.
And most butchers that closed weren't very good. The likes of Baxters just got packets of meat in and sold them. There's a butcher in the 2 neighbouring towns to me that are brilliant, and still doing a good trade. Want meat that's been hung properly or odd joints that supermarkets don't have like ham hocks? They've got them.
People refer to foodies or food snobs, but that's being kind. Most of them are food fascists. It's not good enough that they can choose a family butcher and some organic veg box - they want to force it on everyone else.
D, ask AK Haart for hints and tips on shooting small animals.
JT, thanks for anecdotal. There are plenty of people like D, Lola, you or Mrs W who enjoy cooking fairly fancy stuff and are prepared to shop around a bit - but you all appear to use supermarkets for the "essentials".
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