Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. Joanna Blythman
made up in the supermarket’s prepared food factories: soggy, chopped-up salad leaves, meats you recognise from the ready meals aisles (tikka chicken, barbecue duck, etc.), industrial block cheese, salty tuna and egg mayonnaise without any taste of eggs. It’s no wonder that the sandwiches make such unrewarding eating as well as attacking sensitive teeth with their extreme coldness. But we buy them, even though they aren’t cheap, because we have got used to them since that’s the sort of sandwich supermarkets want to sell us.
The particularly audacious thing about the supermarket prepared-food revolution is the way that supermarkets have taken the culinary limitations of industrial food processing and put a positive spin on them. They claim – erroneously – that their innovation has broadened the British palate, introducing new tastes and flavours, when in fact they are mainly selling us the same standard components, continuously re-assembled and re-marketed in a multiplicity of forms. But since their clientele shop routinely in their stores and so lack any alternative point of reference, this fact usually goes unchallenged. Supermarkets know that because they increasingly control where we shop, the public can be conditioned, by repetition and force of habit, to believe that supermarket TV dinners of the twenty-first century are better than anything they might cook, and possibly even just as good as what they might encounter abroad.
To sustain this tall tale, supermarkets appear to have set themselves a mission of subverting home cooking – the bedrock of any true food culture. Every supermarket chain churns out a stream of recipe cards that purport to encourage home cooking. But home cooking does not make enough money for them. They want the extra margins that can be slipped in with processing. The profits that can be made from convincing people that they don’t need to mash a potato or wash a salad are substantial. So increasingly supermarket shelves are filled with foods that obviate, or at least minimise, the need for any home cooking, and make them a tidy profit at the same time. When chef Rowley Leigh was asked to sample Marks & Spencer ready meals, he estimated that a St Michael pasta and vegetable bake, price £1.99, would cost only 40 pence to make at home while a beef casserole, price £5.58, would cost £1.50 if home made. As food writer Matthew Fort put it: ‘Hand in hand with the microwave and the deep freeze – and ably supported by manufacturers and retailers who can gouge higher profit margins on these “value-added” products – convenience foods have all but eliminated the tradition of domestic cookery from British homes.’ Supermarkets have played the major role in this, providing the means by which the UK has become a ‘can’t cook won’t cook’ nation whose idea of a gourmet night is eating a supermarket ready meal on a tray while watching a procession of celebrity chefs cook fantasy food on TV.
Subtly, supermarkets imply that if you’ve still got the time or inclination to cook on a routine basis, you must be a semi-retired loser, puttering away on the sleepy backwaters of modern life, an endangered species as rare as those who make their own clothes. ‘Alongside work, gym, children, partner, friends and chores, who on earth has a spare second to be a domestic star and spend hours preparing a traditional meal?’ asked Safeway. ‘I certainly wouldn’t bother making my own lasagne from scratch now,’ its buying manager for prepared foods told The Grocer. ‘It’s [our lasagne al forno] the classic lifestyle option for the time poor, cash rich consumer.’ Sainsbury’s usually wins the prize for being the most foodie, therefore pro-cooking, amongst the UK-wide supermarket multiples. But even its initiatives to stimulate home cooking are often thinly disguised marketing opportunities to promote sales of ready-made, processed foods. In 2003, for example, when Sainsbury’s launched cooking classes for children (for which parents pay £5) during the school holidays in selected stores, it pegged them to its Blue Parrot Café children’s brand which features self-styled healthier versions of children’s junk food such as chicken nuggets and pizza. Participating children went away with a Blue Parrot ‘goodie bag’ and a Blue Parrot apron, reminders that if they didn’t feel like cooking, they could always get Mum to pick up something ready-made at Sainsbury’s.
The Great British Cookery Paradox is evidence that supermarkets have made substantial inroads in undermining the nation’s inclination to cook. In spite of the plethora of TV cooking programmes, cookery articles in magazines and newspapers, and cookery books, which should notionally encourage us all to cook, less and less cooking is being done in homes up and down the land. In 2002, UK TV screened 4,000 hours of food programmes; 900 food books and 25 million words about food and cookery were published. But we seem to spend more time watching chefs cook than cooking ourselves. In 1980, the average meal took one hour to prepare; now it takes twenty minutes. It is predicted that this figure will shrink to eight minutes by 2010. The UK has become a nation of food voyeurs rather than cooks, and supermarkets have supplied both the means and the motive. For every person who, after watching Jamie, Gary or Nigella, goes out to buy the raw materials to cook their recipes at home, it seems there are many more who emerge from supermarkets with up-market, ready-meal lookalikes. ‘People who are proficient in cooking … are now beginning to represent a declining proportion within the population … they are arguably also more likely to recognise the difference in cost between purchasing ingredients for home cooking and buying prepared meals,’ market analyst Keynote has concluded – an acknowledgement that the more you cook and know about food, the less you are likely to see supermarket prepared food as either desirable or good value.
A central plank in undermining home cooking and boosting sales of more expensive ready-made foods is blurring the qualitative difference between the real thing and the mass-produced supermarket equivalent. Safeway, for example, describes its The Best range as being ‘as tasty, near to authentic and home-made as possible’. The slight qualification in this claim was absent when it launched a new winter range of ‘traditional British food’ ready meals such as pork, cider and apple casserole and toad in the hole – dishes with all the homey, comforting, feel-good virtues of domestic cooking. Safeway cheekily presented it as the ‘cheat’s guide to making it taste as good as Mum’s’. With a little help from Safeway, in the form of ready meals, everyone, it claimed, could be ‘a brilliant cook, a domestic legend’. Somerfield’s magazine highlighted a reader who was ‘planning a “Cheat’s Dinner Party”, passing off Somerfield ready meals as her own creations!’ Sainsbury’s used the same strategy big time when it targeted Christmas dinner, the one meal in the year most households would expect to cook more or less from scratch, as a processed food opportunity. ‘Who’s to know that you’ve not been slaving away to create a feast? You can take the credit by removing the packaging, safe in the knowledge that Sainsbury’s food experts have taken care of all your festive food needs.’
For years supermarkets have fostered the idea that all over the UK, people are passing off ready meals as home-cooked food without anyone being any the wiser. If that is indeed true, it is a sad indictment of our food awareness. But the proposition strains credulity somewhat. Though it might be possible to pass off a supermarket ready meal as home made to those whose only point of reference is pot noodles, most people can easily spot the difference, if only because supermarket ready meals look and taste depressingly familiar. Most recently, supermarkets have developed ranges of ‘better-than-the-rest’ labels, more upmarket-looking and -sounding ‘gourmet’ brands such as, Safeway, The Best, Tesco’s Finest and Asda’s Extra Special, to cater for ‘well off young couples who have been known to pass off the prepackaged food at their dinner parties’. These ranges are an attempt by supermarkets to head off criticism that their food all tastes over-processed and industrial while inserting a more aspirational top range into their portfolio to keep people interested. They look good in the box, and sell for a considerable premium, but on some products the ingredients list is illuminating evidence of the gastronomic gulf between these aspiring home-entertaining specials and the home-cooked article. The ingredients list for a classic French boeuf bourguignon, for example, is relatively short and sweet, containing no unfamiliar ingredients. The equivalent list on one supermarket’s ‘better-than-the-rest’