furyofvissarion (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
furyofvissarion) wrote2008-12-05 05:15 pm
furyofvissarion) wrote2008-12-05 05:15 pm
Entry tags:
(no subject)
Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets - Joanna Blythman. One thing that struck me from the start was how apparently the supermarket is popularly reviled in the UK. Blythman says it's common to criticize them, both in public discourse & private discussion. If that's true, that is very different from at home, where mostly people seem quite happy to shop in supermarkets.
Her book is a devastating critique of the way supermarkets promote bad food because it's cheap, bully suppliers, and diminish consumer choice while pretending to do the exact opposite. I am sure it's just as bad at home, if not worse, given that the purchase of British supermarket chain Asda by Wal-Mart has only intensified the race to the bottom.
The book reads quickly--Blythman is chatty w/o being too fluffy, & the stuff she's writing about is fascinating. She makes powerful arguments for supporting independent grocers--where they're even available--especially for anyone interested in supporting food diversity or local farmers. The stories shared by suppliers (farmers, small food producers etc.) to supermarkets are v. disturbing: being forced into paying to take your competitor's product off the supermarket shelves before your product is brought in; being given a big order by a chain & completely shifting your business plan to accommodate it & then being unceremoniously dumped; having to grow, say, potatoes w/in an incredibly small size range (we're talking a spread of 10 milimeters here!) or having your shipment rejected; developing a unique product, building a market for it w/supermarkets & then having the supermarket steal your work to come up w/a cheaper own-label version & then dumping you, being paid so little for your produce that sometimes it's more effective just to plow under the field, etc. etc. etc. A majority of the suppliers she spoke to would not allow their names to be used, so great was their fear of retribution by supermarkets for speaking up.
Of course supermarket workers generally don't get much of a good deal either; putting her Barbara Ehrenreich hat on, she goes to work at Tesco as a cashier, & attempts to work at Asda but can't bear their "Big Welcome"--a cheerily brainwashing 3-day orientation for new employees. (Creepily, each store apparently has a "Miles of Smiles" wall in their employee section--where employees who have been chastised for customer service failings must make public vows to do better: "'I will treat customers as I would like to be treated myself,' signed and dated by Lucy in checkouts, or 'I aim to give my customers the best service ever,' from Mohammed in produce.")
On the food quality side, there are tidbits like the following: it's not unusual for a supermarket chain, because of the time involved in transporting & storing out-of-season produce from thousands of miles away, to request its suppliers to provide tomatoes that have a shelf life of ELEVEN DAYS. What kind of tomato would last that long??? Certainly not a tasty one. And yet because the vast majority of groceries are purchased at supermarkets, & supermarkets care more about uniformity & shelf stability, farmers are more & more often now growing just a few, bland, inferior varieties of fruits & vegetables.
Anyway--this book certainly makes a good case for avoiding supermarkets as much as possible. However, I felt that she ignored the issue of people who can't afford to shop at independent grocers, who are, usually through no fault of their own, more expensive. Yeah, I'm sure Kwik Save's infamous 3p cans of baked beans came from suppliers that were treated like absolute crap, but what about people who can't afford to shop elsewhere? Maybe she thinks there's nothing these folks can do, but she doesn't even bother to mention that. She seems to recognize that sometimes even finding a non-chain grocery store takes some looking, at least, but her abrupt ending section on what people can do seems solely geared towards people who have the money to not worry too much about shopping elsewhere. Not to mention, the section read like a giant DUH because if you've read to the end of the book & not gotten the message that you ought to put as much money as you can from your grocery budget into independent stores' cash registers, then... you weren't really reading.
Popco - Scarlett Thomas. Yes, again. So comforting & inspiring, & really, do I have to write about it again? Go check out the zillion other times I've read it & blogged it.
Ill Wind - Rachel Caine. Another comfort re-read--yay for my new local library having this one. Delicious & frothy & fun as ever.
Bad Food Britain: How a Nation Ruined Its Appetite - Joanna Blythman. Some overlap from Shopped, but here she's looking at why the British reputation for bad food is, to her mind, deserved. British people are cooking less & less, & eating more & more of the ready meals that supermarkets are only too ready to push (it does seem to me that there are even more of them on the shelves than at home). To the British, food is fuel, not pleasure, & cooking is not an important ritual worthy of spending time on, but something to avoid or minimize.
The book starts off w/a bunch of disturbing survey stats: 1 in 3 Britons don't eat vegetables b/c they take too much effort to prepare; 50% of Britons "really enjoy eating" while 57% of men & 58% of women have "little interest in food".
I think some of Blythman's passion for promoting "real food" is snobbery: oh no, people can't appreciate artisan bread & eat too many crisps! However, I think she makes some really good points in that the continuing trend towards ready meals means that people's diets are becoming way unhealthy (b/c hi, ready meals are generally stuffed full of weird chemicals, salt, partially hydrogenated oils, etc.), & that people lose out when they don't know how to cook & also don't see eating as a time to recharge w/family & friends. I would also say that ready meals are way more expensive than cooking from scratch, & also eating them means you're giving up the power to choose what goes in your body to multinational companies whose interest is not in your health but your wallet.
She also points out how people are increasingly suspicious of any bit of messiness/naturalness about their food--one anecdote shows a woman complaining about a bit of dirt on an egg in a carton, & she speculates to the grocer that the naughty hen probably SAT on it (you think?); apparently no one wants meat in the supermarket that looks like what it is, either: a bloody dead animal. 36% of children couldn't identify the main ingredient in chips, and 60% thought potatoes grew on trees. And as is typical outside schools as well, it is more expensive to buy healthy food--a jacket potato w/one filling & a salad cost over twice as much as a burger & chips in a typical secondary school, researchers found. Supermarkets run many more sales on processed foods compared to sales on raw, fresh ingredients.
Home Economics classes in school have now been turned to Food Technology, where your final project might be to "draw up a computerized model process flow chart showing the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system for a product such as 'Saucy Chicken Animals.'" Students would not generally get to do any actual cooking during the course.
She gives a lot of examples of how other countries in Europe (BTW, it cracks me up how Brits always think that they're not part of Europe) have thriving food cultures--for example, it's only in the UK (& the US, which sets the bad examples that the UK is following) that children are given a children's menu in restaurants; elsewhere, it's a given that they eat what the adults eat, & they generally do it w/o temper tantrums. Blythman also makes the sharp point that being "too busy to cook" is seen as a sign of success these days, & if you do prepare meals from scratch at home, you look like an underachiever (how on earth do you have time to do that? Shouldn't you be at work/at the gym/ferrying kids around/being a social climber/etc.?).
I did get annoyed w/her slamming of vegans as "hard-line" & her praise of vegetarians as being satisfied w/the "more moderate line that it is wrong to eat a food that has caused the death of an animal." Hi, ignorance! What does she think happens to dairy cows that don't produce enough milk, or hens that have stopped laying? Retirement in a breezy green pasture? In the sky, maybe.
Anyway--both this book & Shopped buy into fatphobia regarding health & diet, which is frustrating & a shame, esp. b/c both books don't need that kind of junk to make their points. Both books also end rather abruptly--I didn't realize I was reading the final chapter until I turned the page & saw a references section. Nevertheless, well worth reading, & I might dig around & see if Blythman has written other stuff on this topic.
Green Living in the Urban Jungle - Lucy Siegle. Someone near me put this, & some other books, out on their garden wall as giveaways; otherwise I wouldn't have picked this up. It's about what I expected: ways for shopaholic, middle-class oh-so-busy & oh-so-cool people to make small (but hopefully significant) changes in their lives to be a bit greener. Lots of advice about things that are greener but still hip & that won't make you look too “worthy.” Obnoxious, but I guess there must be an audience out there for this & if it gets more trendy people to buy less take-out & cook local veggies, that's something! Now I'll go put this out on my garden wall.
Her book is a devastating critique of the way supermarkets promote bad food because it's cheap, bully suppliers, and diminish consumer choice while pretending to do the exact opposite. I am sure it's just as bad at home, if not worse, given that the purchase of British supermarket chain Asda by Wal-Mart has only intensified the race to the bottom.
The book reads quickly--Blythman is chatty w/o being too fluffy, & the stuff she's writing about is fascinating. She makes powerful arguments for supporting independent grocers--where they're even available--especially for anyone interested in supporting food diversity or local farmers. The stories shared by suppliers (farmers, small food producers etc.) to supermarkets are v. disturbing: being forced into paying to take your competitor's product off the supermarket shelves before your product is brought in; being given a big order by a chain & completely shifting your business plan to accommodate it & then being unceremoniously dumped; having to grow, say, potatoes w/in an incredibly small size range (we're talking a spread of 10 milimeters here!) or having your shipment rejected; developing a unique product, building a market for it w/supermarkets & then having the supermarket steal your work to come up w/a cheaper own-label version & then dumping you, being paid so little for your produce that sometimes it's more effective just to plow under the field, etc. etc. etc. A majority of the suppliers she spoke to would not allow their names to be used, so great was their fear of retribution by supermarkets for speaking up.
Of course supermarket workers generally don't get much of a good deal either; putting her Barbara Ehrenreich hat on, she goes to work at Tesco as a cashier, & attempts to work at Asda but can't bear their "Big Welcome"--a cheerily brainwashing 3-day orientation for new employees. (Creepily, each store apparently has a "Miles of Smiles" wall in their employee section--where employees who have been chastised for customer service failings must make public vows to do better: "'I will treat customers as I would like to be treated myself,' signed and dated by Lucy in checkouts, or 'I aim to give my customers the best service ever,' from Mohammed in produce.")
On the food quality side, there are tidbits like the following: it's not unusual for a supermarket chain, because of the time involved in transporting & storing out-of-season produce from thousands of miles away, to request its suppliers to provide tomatoes that have a shelf life of ELEVEN DAYS. What kind of tomato would last that long??? Certainly not a tasty one. And yet because the vast majority of groceries are purchased at supermarkets, & supermarkets care more about uniformity & shelf stability, farmers are more & more often now growing just a few, bland, inferior varieties of fruits & vegetables.
Anyway--this book certainly makes a good case for avoiding supermarkets as much as possible. However, I felt that she ignored the issue of people who can't afford to shop at independent grocers, who are, usually through no fault of their own, more expensive. Yeah, I'm sure Kwik Save's infamous 3p cans of baked beans came from suppliers that were treated like absolute crap, but what about people who can't afford to shop elsewhere? Maybe she thinks there's nothing these folks can do, but she doesn't even bother to mention that. She seems to recognize that sometimes even finding a non-chain grocery store takes some looking, at least, but her abrupt ending section on what people can do seems solely geared towards people who have the money to not worry too much about shopping elsewhere. Not to mention, the section read like a giant DUH because if you've read to the end of the book & not gotten the message that you ought to put as much money as you can from your grocery budget into independent stores' cash registers, then... you weren't really reading.
Popco - Scarlett Thomas. Yes, again. So comforting & inspiring, & really, do I have to write about it again? Go check out the zillion other times I've read it & blogged it.
Ill Wind - Rachel Caine. Another comfort re-read--yay for my new local library having this one. Delicious & frothy & fun as ever.
Bad Food Britain: How a Nation Ruined Its Appetite - Joanna Blythman. Some overlap from Shopped, but here she's looking at why the British reputation for bad food is, to her mind, deserved. British people are cooking less & less, & eating more & more of the ready meals that supermarkets are only too ready to push (it does seem to me that there are even more of them on the shelves than at home). To the British, food is fuel, not pleasure, & cooking is not an important ritual worthy of spending time on, but something to avoid or minimize.
The book starts off w/a bunch of disturbing survey stats: 1 in 3 Britons don't eat vegetables b/c they take too much effort to prepare; 50% of Britons "really enjoy eating" while 57% of men & 58% of women have "little interest in food".
I think some of Blythman's passion for promoting "real food" is snobbery: oh no, people can't appreciate artisan bread & eat too many crisps! However, I think she makes some really good points in that the continuing trend towards ready meals means that people's diets are becoming way unhealthy (b/c hi, ready meals are generally stuffed full of weird chemicals, salt, partially hydrogenated oils, etc.), & that people lose out when they don't know how to cook & also don't see eating as a time to recharge w/family & friends. I would also say that ready meals are way more expensive than cooking from scratch, & also eating them means you're giving up the power to choose what goes in your body to multinational companies whose interest is not in your health but your wallet.
She also points out how people are increasingly suspicious of any bit of messiness/naturalness about their food--one anecdote shows a woman complaining about a bit of dirt on an egg in a carton, & she speculates to the grocer that the naughty hen probably SAT on it (you think?); apparently no one wants meat in the supermarket that looks like what it is, either: a bloody dead animal. 36% of children couldn't identify the main ingredient in chips, and 60% thought potatoes grew on trees. And as is typical outside schools as well, it is more expensive to buy healthy food--a jacket potato w/one filling & a salad cost over twice as much as a burger & chips in a typical secondary school, researchers found. Supermarkets run many more sales on processed foods compared to sales on raw, fresh ingredients.
Home Economics classes in school have now been turned to Food Technology, where your final project might be to "draw up a computerized model process flow chart showing the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system for a product such as 'Saucy Chicken Animals.'" Students would not generally get to do any actual cooking during the course.
She gives a lot of examples of how other countries in Europe (BTW, it cracks me up how Brits always think that they're not part of Europe) have thriving food cultures--for example, it's only in the UK (& the US, which sets the bad examples that the UK is following) that children are given a children's menu in restaurants; elsewhere, it's a given that they eat what the adults eat, & they generally do it w/o temper tantrums. Blythman also makes the sharp point that being "too busy to cook" is seen as a sign of success these days, & if you do prepare meals from scratch at home, you look like an underachiever (how on earth do you have time to do that? Shouldn't you be at work/at the gym/ferrying kids around/being a social climber/etc.?).
I did get annoyed w/her slamming of vegans as "hard-line" & her praise of vegetarians as being satisfied w/the "more moderate line that it is wrong to eat a food that has caused the death of an animal." Hi, ignorance! What does she think happens to dairy cows that don't produce enough milk, or hens that have stopped laying? Retirement in a breezy green pasture? In the sky, maybe.
Anyway--both this book & Shopped buy into fatphobia regarding health & diet, which is frustrating & a shame, esp. b/c both books don't need that kind of junk to make their points. Both books also end rather abruptly--I didn't realize I was reading the final chapter until I turned the page & saw a references section. Nevertheless, well worth reading, & I might dig around & see if Blythman has written other stuff on this topic.
Green Living in the Urban Jungle - Lucy Siegle. Someone near me put this, & some other books, out on their garden wall as giveaways; otherwise I wouldn't have picked this up. It's about what I expected: ways for shopaholic, middle-class oh-so-busy & oh-so-cool people to make small (but hopefully significant) changes in their lives to be a bit greener. Lots of advice about things that are greener but still hip & that won't make you look too “worthy.” Obnoxious, but I guess there must be an audience out there for this & if it gets more trendy people to buy less take-out & cook local veggies, that's something! Now I'll go put this out on my garden wall.