A Greedy Man in a Hungry World: How

2.

SUPERMARKETS ARE NOT EVIL

Berwick Street in London’s Soho. It is the mid-sixties and my dad is striding past market stalls laden with fruit and vegetables and meat and fish and bolts of cloth and a whole bunch of other things besides. There has been a market on this site since 1778 and it remains there to this day, albeit much reduced. In the sixties, though, it was a vital part of Soho’s village life, closing the road between the junction with Broadwick Street to the north and Walker’s Court to the south, home then to the infamous Raymond’s Revue Bar and its special brand of nipple-tasselled stripping. Even to this day Soho manages to cling onto its reputation for debauchery. The ‘models’ still advertise their availability by placing in the windows of their dingy flats the sort of red tassel-shaded lamps you’d normally find in a B&B in Torquay; places like Walker’s Court are still lined with sex shops, even if they are a little more glossy and welcoming than once they were. But in the sixties Soho was the real deal, run by Maltese hoods who had the vice squad of the Metropolitan Police in their pay, so they could continue trading merrily in the glorious triumvirate of prostitution, drugs and gambling. If you were in the market for filth, Soho was where you went.

But it was still a mixed economy. In spite of – or perhaps because of – the loucheness, other industries congregated here. Some of the best Italian delicatessens in town were here (and still are), the British film industry had started occupying the warrens of offices not used by the hookers, and many of the shop units were home to the cheaper tailors, serving the theatres of the West End or the kind of clients who liked their lapels just a little too wide. Many of the narrow alleyways were filled with shops stacked with cloths of myriad weights and hues. And, of course, there was the street market.

My father, Des, fitted in well. Although he started his working life as an actor, he had become bored with unemployment and starvation and moved into the fashion industry, and worked now as a PR for the classy mid-market label Alexon. I like to think of him marching down Berwick Street in the ankle-length black leather coat with the shaggy black fur collar that he liked to wear, a cravat tied at the neck, hair swept back, beard trimmed just so. My old man wasn’t in the fashion business for nothing. And so he stops now at one of the fruit stalls to pick up some apples to take to my mother, who is back home looking after my older brother and sister. For we are in the golden age of the local shop and the street market. Self-service supermarkets are burgeoning across the US, but not yet widespread here in the UK. Even the well-known company J. Sainsbury does not generally run supermarkets. They are merely grocers, and when you shop there you must queue at separate counters for meat and dairy and fish and so on.

The fact is that there is nothing much more convenient than this market stall for a man in search of apples. So now Des points to the pristine fruit on the display that he wants. The stallholder turns and starts filling the bag from an unseen box hidden away somewhere underneath.

‘Hang on a moment,’ says Des. ‘I can’t see which apples you’re giving me.’

‘I’ll give you whichever bloody apples I like,’ says the man.

‘In which case,’ Des replies, ‘you can keep ’em.’ He turns and walks away only to hear the stallholder shout after him: ‘Suit yourself, you black-bearded, bollock-faced bastard.’

This is one of the stories with which I grew up; one of those legends that all families have. My dad was a black-bearded, bollock-faced bastard. ‘What was it that man called you?’ my mother would ask from the opposite end of the dinner table, when she thought he was being difficult. And we would reply in unison: ‘A black-bearded, bollock-faced bastard.’

What does this story tell us? Just this: that whatever critics of supermarkets might like to tell you, the alternatives – street markets and local shops – were not, and are not, all run by lovely people, with a genuine interest in and concern for all their customers. They are merely run by people. As they are across the rest of society, some people are lovely. Some of them do genuinely care about the people who shop with them. And some of those shopkeepers and market stallholders are miserable scumbags who are to customer service what napalm is to peace.

Another story, this time from the other side of the debate. I am in the very large Tesco supermarket near my home in Brixton, south London, doing the weekly shop. I am with my son Eddie, who must be 2 or 3 years old; certainly he has not yet started school. Usually he does this shop with my wife, who works part-time, and it quickly becomes clear that he is very comfortable here. For, everywhere we go, the staff say hello to him. It doesn’t just happen once or twice during our hour in Tesco. It happens perhaps eight or ten times: from the shelf stackers to the women on the deli counter to those working the checkouts. All of them know Eddie by name and have a few words for him. I am intrigued by this and so begin to notice something. We are not the only people this happens to. There are conversations between staff and customers going on all over the place, and they are not simply about which aisle the dried fruits are located on. The staff here know their customers, which really isn’t surprising, because almost all the employees come from the heart of this community.

So what does this second story tell us? Just this: that whatever critics of supermarkets might like to tell you, they are not all bland, anonymous, swollen warehouses disconnected from the neighbourhoods in which they sit. Of course, some of them might be. Some of them might feel like waiting rooms for death, just as some local shopkeepers are not very nice. But the assumptions we make about these enormous shops from which we buy the vast majority of our food simply do not stand up.

We forget very easily just what life was like in the World Before Supermarkets. I am old enough to remember as a small child being taken on the family food shopping expedition to J. Sainsbury’s in Kenton, north-west London, and the way we really would move from counter to counter. It was my job to say ‘six wings and six legs’ to the man at the butchery counter, so he could fill our weekly chicken order. It was cute. It was adorable. It was one of the ways in which my mother made the whole damn experience in some way bearable. The thing at the chicken counter broke up the tedium. Our bread came from the baker’s on the corner by our house, our fruit and veg from Robert the Greengrocers across the road, and any tinned goods from a small shop called Walton, Hassle and Port ten minutes’ walk away. It sounds lovely, doesn’t it, this patronage of local and small businesses, this tight web of inter-dependent relationships? And we did like the people involved. But gathering everything that the family might need for the week was a tiresome job.

My mother is gone now, but her close friend Carole Shuter, who also had three small kids in the sixties and seventies, remembers it in detail. ‘Oh God, it was a whole morning’s outing,’ she told me. ‘You’d have to clear the diary. I remember the Sainsbury’s thing very well, the way we had to queue half a dozen times and pay separately at each one. People romanticize things like butter being sold in blocks and you asking for a bit to be cut off, but you wouldn’t romanticize it if you had to do it every bloody week. It takes so long.’

Alan Sainsbury, the family-owned firm’s head, had come across the notion of self-service supermarkets in the US in the years immediately after the Second World War, and imported the idea. The company opened its first self-service branch in Croydon, just south of London, in 1950. Still, the roll-out didn’t begin in earnest until many years later, after Sainsbury’s went public in 1973 with what was then the biggest flotation in British stock exchange history. It didn’t reach our corner of London until the early seventies. (The last counter store hung on, in Peckham, until 1982.)

‘The first proper supermarket was a complete revelation,’ Carole says. ‘It was bloody marvellous. People are too quick to demean modern developments like that. They have no idea what it was like before. No idea at all.’

The point is that women like my mother and Carole had far better things to do than waste whole mornings of their week just getting the food shopping done. In Felicity Lawrence’s highly regarded book Not on the Label, a searing critique of Britain’s supermarkets, first published in 2004, she writes about the joys of shopping locally; of how it could be a bonding experience for her and her young family; that there was always time for such pleasures.

Really? Many of the generation of women who came before Felicity Lawrence that I talked to about this regarded it as a retrograde step: an attempt to cast women in a role they had fought throughout the second half of the twentieth century to throw off. One went as far as to say to me that buried within the anti-supermarket argument was one that sounded profoundly anti-woman because it was always the women who were burdened with the job of schlepping around the shops, which in turn made the notion of their having a full-time profession all but unsupportable. Whether the arguments around supermarkets really can be cast in these terms – a modern embarrassment about the idea that such things as food shopping should ever be seen as women’s work do kick in here – there is no doubt that, by reducing the number of hours needed to get domestic chores done, there was more time for other things. And thank Christ for that, because otherwise the economics of domestic life would have been completely unsustainable.

There are, of course, the economies of scale. Supermarkets make things cheaper. They just do. When you have more than 2,500 stores, as Tesco does, or over 1,000 like Sainsbury’s, you have serious buying power. Over 80 per cent of the retail food market spend is concentrated in the hands of the big supermarkets and, whatever the downsides of that, it has, historically, led to cheaper food. In the early post-war years it took over a third of average salary to pay for the food shop. Today it is just under 10 per cent. Or, to put it another way, you had to work until Wednesday morning to pay for the family’s weekly shop; now you’ll have earned enough by some time just after noon on Monday. And that’s not because salaries have increased enormously, compared with all the other costs we face; quite the opposite.

For these are the economic realities within which supermarkets operate. In 1962 average yearly pay was £799. By 2012 it was £26,200. It has increased by a factor of just over thirty. However, the picture with house prices is rather different. In 1962 the average house in Britain cost £2,670. Fifty years later it costs around £245,000. House prices have therefore increased by a factor of over ninety. Just stare at those numbers for a moment. House prices have increased at roughly three times the rate of earnings. Brutal, those figures, aren’t they? Faced with these realities, all those interesting historical debates about the fight by women like my mother and her friend Carole for the right to go out to work in the sixties and seventies become completely irrelevant. It’s no longer about the right to work. It’s about the need to work. The fact of the matter is that to support and run a household both members of a couple with kids need to be holding down full-time jobs. That makes them hideously time-poor. Ask anybody today to clear a morning of their diary just to go down the road to watch a man cut the butter you need off a huge block and they’d laugh in your face. In that context, supermarkets really are not evil. They are a complete godsend.

They are something else too, something the legions of food obsessives who spend so much of their time bemoaning their dreadful impact on our culture could never bring themselves to admit. Supermarkets are a force for change, good change, the sort of change that makes life worth living. We talk endlessly about food revolutions, about the way our culture has developed over the years; how we have gone from a time when olive oil was something sold in the chemist’s for earache, and Parmesan cheese came grated unto dust and smelling lightly of vomit, to a foodie Shangri-La in which we all feast at a national table weighed down with gloriously good things to eat. We go on about this without noticing that in the vanguard of this revolution are the supermarkets. None of the things we take for granted these days – bunches of fresh brassic flat-leaf parsley rather than the dried, friable stuff that looks like the wrong end of a pot-pourri; butter from Brittany with crunchy salt crystals and a slight cheesy edge; cooking chorizos; crisp, green, peppery first-press olive oils; artisan breads; free-range eggs; big, butch sausages made from happy, outdoor-reared pigs; Thai cooking pastes; miso sauce and fish sauce and sesame oil, and so many other things besides – would be as freely and as widely available as they are today without the supermarkets.

I remember the first moment this struck me. It was the mid-nineties and I was on holiday in the Yorkshire Dales. We took a day trip to Blackpool. I’m not sure why. I think we just wanted to feel cheap and dirty for an afternoon. It worked. In a good way. On the way back I decided we should stop off at the big supermarket – I think it was an Asda – on the edge of town to pick up some stuff for dinner. I had a double rack of lamb back at the cottage we were renting and I wanted to stuff it with a mixture of breadcrumbs and basil, olives, anchovies and caramelized onions. In those days my credentials as an urbane young man, who understood the imperatives of a Mediterranean diet, rested on that thing I did with the double rack of lamb. It was something I made quite often at home, but to caramelize the onions I needed a bottle of deep, dark, sour-sweet balsamic vinegar. In London, getting hold of some of that was no problem at all. There was always a well-stocked deli somewhere nearby, ready to do the business. But on the edge of Blackpool? I trudged moodily around the aisles, my face fixed in a sneer of pure metropolitan disdain. In short, I had my normal face on.

Soon the expression was gone. For there, on the shelf, was not just a bottle of balsamic vinegar. There was a choice of balsamics. Oh my.

This story looks ludicrous, doesn’t it? It’s quite clear that I’m a patronizing schmuck. What’s so amazing about balsamic vinegar in a Blackpool supermarket? But that’s the thing. In the nineties – less than twenty years ago – everything was amazing about this. I left that Asda clutching my bottle of balsamic – and my fresh basil, and my glistening anchovies – feeling like the country in which I lived was suddenly a better place. And it was suddenly a better place because a supermarket had decided to stock the things I wanted to eat.

Why had this happened? Because food media in Britain, as elsewhere around the world, had exploded.

A SHORT HISTORY OF A FOOD REVOLUTION

Just as we have to acknowledge the part that the supermarkets have played in revolutionizing the way we eat, so we also have to swallow hard and accept that the key people responsible for changing the way we eat in Britain are those renowned gourmands Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch.

I’ll say that again: Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. Or, to give them their full job descriptions, arguably Britain’s most divisive post-war Prime Minister, and a media mogul now generally regarded as having been at the head of a company whose employees routinely engaged in phone hacking.

Let’s go back a bit. Whenever you hear Britain’s Dordogne-loving middle classes engage in eye-rolling about the state of food culture in their own country and extolling the virtues and marvels of France, where every small town and village supports a perfect restaurant, and where they do not object to spending reasonable sums of money on food, and a family bonding experience involves slaughtering a whole pig and butchering it down so that everything other than the oink can be eaten, it is worth reminding them of this: during the Second World War the French quickly decided the game was up, laid down their arms and got on with their lives. Or lunch, as they called it.

When that great historian and social commentator Bart Simpson described the French as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ he was obviously being shamelessly provocative.

On the other hand, as with all great gags, there was more than a grain of truth in it. The French do eat an awful lot of cheese. Witness General de Gaulle’s great gastronomic boast, disguised as despair, about the impossibility of successfully ruling a country that has ‘246 different kinds of cheese’. And, well, they did actually surrender. Quite a lot.

Britain, meanwhile, locked in a war of national survival, industrialized its food-production system and introduced rationing on a vast scale. (And yes, of course, there was also some rationing in France during the twentieth century, but nothing like on the scale of that in Britain.) It is hard to overstate the damage that this war did to Britain’s food culture. A whole generation forgot how to cook. Likewise, a genuine fight for survival, combined with an ingrained Puritanism which regarded the spending of anything more than necessary on food as plain wrong, made completely redundant any sort of interest in food beyond its importance for basic nutrition.

There were, of course, torch-bearers in post-war Britain who fought the good fight. Raymond Postgate launched The Good Food Guide in 1951, identifying the few places worth eating in by soliciting reviews from diners around the country; it was an early example of the kind of crowdsourcing the web would make de rigueur half a century later. A few chefs and restaurateurs – George Perry-Smith at the Hole in the Wall in Bath, for example, Joyce Molyneux at the Carved Angel in Dartmouth, or Brian Sack and Francis Coulson at Sharrow Bay in the Lake District – worked hard to introduce a select band of people to a better way of eating. But it was a minority sport for what was regarded as a decadent, over-indulged minority. Hell, in the early seventies most people had to live with the lights going off half the time. Against that a dish of salmon en croute with a sorrel sauce wasn’t merely a luxury; many people thought it was nothing less than an obscenity.