Supersize Supermarkets

The other day, I caught the middle of an interview with a man from one of the larger supermarkets on the radio. He was lamenting the fact that, at the moment, only 35 per cent of the urban population and only 25 per cent of the rural population have access to all four of the big supermarkets.

Only? I thought. Isn’t that enough? Not for him it wasn’t. What he wants, or what he says he wants, is everyone in Britain to have the choice of shopping at all four major supermarkets.

And I wondered: does anyone listening think this guy is really speaking for them, as a shopper? Was anyone thinking, yeah! That’s what I want – four different supermarkets within easy driving distance. Why not build them right outside my door? I can’t imagine why anyone would want that. But if you think you do, you should be careful what you wish for… because if the big four ever achieve that level of saturation, ‘choice’ is the last thing you’ll have. Supermarket shopping will be all you’re allowed for the rest of your days – you’re not going to have anywhere else to buy your daily bread.

But then I realised that everyone having access to four supermarkets isn’t really what he wants, either. What he really wants is everyone having access to one of his stores. Of course, he put it slightly differently. He put it in a way that allowed him to express his ideal as if it’s some kind of gift to the consumer.

And this is what really got my goat. This is the big lie peddled every day by the supermarkets. They are constantly telling us that all they ever do is give the consumer what they want. But time and time again they have been guilty of putting their stores where they are emphatically not wanted, and of rail-roading or simply buying out local planning policy to do so.

In the end this man, with his happy, smiley but curiously soulless voice, left me in no doubt about one thing – what they all want is total domination of the British retail sector. And they want it not for the benefit of local communities or for their staff, not for their suppliers, nor even for their loyal customers: they want it for their balance sheets, and their shareholders, and themselves.

In the end this man, with his happy, smiley but curiously soulless voice, left me in no doubt about one thing – what they all want is total domination of the British retail sector

All this, of course, is a massive threat to local food communities, by which I mean small town high streets, local markets and farm shops. And I know this from personal experience. Even in the relatively affluent West Country where I live, the market towns and high streets are not what they were before the big fat supermarkets – one, two, sometimes three of them – came and sat on the edge of town and sucked the lifeblood out. In fact, they’re often a shadow of their former selves.

How can local businesses, independent grocers and small artisan food stores survive this onslaught of land acquisition and intensive grasping for market share? Often they can’t, and the increasing prevalence of what have been dubbed ghost towns, or clone towns, is proof of that.

What scares me the most, however, is not that supermarkets are ignoring the issue of sourcing local food – it’s that they’re finally acknowledging it. And it scares me because they are beginning to tell us that we needn’t worry about local markets, looking after small producers and reducing food miles, because they will do it all for us. They’ll dress up a little corner of their store to look like a French market stall and pull in a few local cheeses and a couple of cauliflowers. There you go, they’ll say, there’s your local food.

This is not a commitment to local food. It is cynical window-dressing. In fact, it’s worse than window-dressing: it’s deceit, a bare-faced lie about what their business is really up to. It’s like a crack dealer deciding that it would be good for public relations if he sold fudge, or flowers, as well as drugs. He’ll happily sell you the flowers, he might even give them away, because he knows he’ll get you further down the aisle with his main line of business: selling drugs. Buy one gram, get one free. And a free assemble-it-yourself crack pipe with every £100 you spend.

What we are witnessing is an ugly, brutish fight to win the lion’s share of a massive global business selling something that we all need, every single day: food. We are innocent bystanders, caught in the cross-fire, and we are finding it very difficult to influence the outcome.

The supermarkets will argue that we benefit hugely from this fight as the cost of food comes down, and down, and down. Many of us may agree – and if you are genuinely struggling to meet the weekly food bill, then that’s understandable. But many more of us go along with this as if it’s somehow unchangeable and inevitable – it’s just the way things are. Either we lack the energy or the focus to fight for something better, or we are cursed with a mentality that can’t resist a bargain, even if we can well afford something better.

Well, let’s try and banish that bargain mentality, find a bit of focus, and consider the true cost of that price war. I believe it’s destroying our farmers, and the land they work on. In particular, it’s putting huge stress on the livestock we raise and kill for meat. The constant pressure to cut prices has a direct effect on animal welfare. I’ve visited intensive poultry units and pig farms – and I’ve always said that anyone who witnessed how these so-called farms are run would not want anything to do with their products. Pain and suffering are built into these systems. And when you see how an intensively farmed chicken or sow lives, the extra pound or two for a free-range alternative suddenly seems worth paying. And that’s something I was finally able to prove in the television programmes I made last year – by taking people who loved cheap chicken, and had never questioned where it came from, to see for themselves how it’s produced. Not one of them eats it now.

What we are witnessing is an ugly, brutish fight to win the lion’s share of a massive global business selling something that we all need, every single day: food

But it’s not just animal welfare we should be worrying about. This kind of factory farming potentially has a devastating human cost: BSE, Foot and Mouth, and Bird Flu are all products of human greed, or perhaps human desperation, in the bid to deliver endless mountains of cheap meat. Taken as a whole, industrial farming across the globe is a bubbling pressure cooker of unsustainable and dangerous practice. And the heat under that pressure cooker, constant and unrelenting, is coming from the supermarkets. When the top blows off, we’re all going to be in an awful mess.

Finally, the real reason why this issue means so much to me personally is that I feel the supermarkets are systematically destroying our food culture. They are reducing our national diet to bland and repetitive sludge. They are denying the seasonality of our food-producing landscape. They are promoting sameness and mediocrity.

Those who put quality before profit do not thrive in this culture – they are marginalised. If you would rather grow a tomato that tastes great than one that is perfectly shaped and lasts a month in the fridge, then the supermarket doesn’t want to know you. If your bread is made by hand, in small batches, and raised by natural yeast, then you can forget it. If it’s made by computerised machines and raised by chemicals, well done, you’re in.

The fact is, the supermarkets now control the means of production. You have to do it their way, or go to the wall. This is a totalitarian food state, from farm to plate, from earth to mouth. Consequently, Britain is in danger of becoming a duller place to eat, and a sadder place to live.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. If we’re going to find the solution to this, it’s going to come in part from consumers and the choices they make. But we’re now also looking to the government to help protect suppliers and communities from the blight of these all-consuming beasts. Hopefully, its response will take us a lot further down the road to true consumer choice, as opposed to supermarket hegemony.