No European country is as reliant on supermarkets for its food shopping as Britain. It is no coincidence that the UK also has the worst eating habits in Europe.
The most successful celebrity endorsement ever, Prunella Scales’ TV ads have added more than £2.2 billion to Tesco’s profts. And yet she says she really cares about the environment.
Are you a ‘premium loyal’, a ‘loyal low spender’, a ‘can’t stay away’… or don’t you care? Tesco does, and uses the data collected from your loyalty card to dictate what you buy, when you buy and how much you buy.
As the supermarket doors glide open there they are – cosmetically perfect, irresistibly firm, brilliantly coloured fruit and vegetables. And yet, when you get them home, they taste of nothing. Is it the way you cooked them, or have you just selected badly? No, you’ve been conned.
Lying on tilted beds of glistening ice, fish from around the world gaze unblinkingly at bored supermarket shoppers. Red snappers, ‘air freighted for freshness’ from the Indian Ocean; Chilean seabass ‘previously frozen’ from the Southern Atlantic; Farmed salmon from the Isles of Scotland; exotic, seemingly abundant fresh fish.
Monsanto’s global website says: ‘Imagine innovative agriculture that creates "incredible" things today.’ Actually, I think most of us are more interested in ‘credible’ things when it comes to agriculture. Like food that people can trust is safe. And crops that meet the needs of the farmers that grow them. The Monsanto slogan used to be ‘food, health, hope’. As if this wasn’t absurd enough, it has now been changed to ‘Imagine™’. John Lennon must be turning in his grave.
Supermarkets are keen to portray themselves as loyal and supportive business partners, nurturing suppliers in their quest for the best deal for consumers.
Joanna Blythman describes how she infiltrated the employee-conditioning process of Asda, subjecting herself to its brain-melting mix of Maoist self-criticism and revivalist-style fervour
We were being given 20 to 21 pence a kilo, they were selling them in the stores at twice that, and we needed 32 pence to break even. The prices would change by the day, and then they’d take 60 to 90 days to pay you.
For 40 years Percy Schmeiser grew oilseed rape on his farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Usually, he would sow each year’s crop with seeds saved from the previous harvest. In 1998 Monsanto took Schmeiser to court.
In February a report by George W Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) suggested that fast food workers might in the future be classified as manufacturing workers. A CEA report asked: ‘When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a “service”, or is it combining inputs to “manufacture’ a product?’
