The Idler

Conversations: Joanna Blythman

Dan Kieran went to meet the renowned author of Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. From Idler 34

We love supermarkets. We must do because eighty percent of the food we eat in Britain comes from them. Supermarkets have made food cheaper than it used to be, we have more choice today than before they were here and they’ve made shopping much more convenient. Or have they? Not according to Joanna Blythman.

IDLER: We loved your book, it is very Idler-ish in the sense that it tells the truth. But reading it was terrifying. Did the things you found out shock you?

BLYTHMAN: I thought I was going to find problems with the way the supermarkets operated and I went through a phase of being shocked. One farmer who had literally to chip leeks out of a frozen field on his hands and knees with a chisel to prevent his company losing its supermarket contract. I remember going back to the car thinking, “Oh my God, it’s so awful!” But then I just became used to the horror of it, so now I take it for granted that supermarkets behave in this way.

The suppliers are so feudal. I’m not very business minded, but when they say to you they’re growing hundreds of acres of vegetables for a supermarket but they don’t have a contract… I thought, doesn’t every business rely on contracts? I just didn’t know anything about it. But that’s when you start to realise where the power lies.

IDLER: You say that ready meals have had a huge impact on whether people buy raw ingredients.

BLYTHMAN: That is the most worrying thing. When the older generation is gone there will be almost no one alive other than butchers who know what a properly hung piece of beef looks like. It’s like a chain of knowledge that’s being eroded because of the way supermarkets have changed how we eat.

IDLER: My Gran says, “You don’t realize how many different varieties of apples there are.”

BLYTHMAN: Supposedly supermarkets give us this fabulous choice and before supermarkets we were in this state of rationing, you know, black and white films. It’s quite a psychological achievement when you look at how narrow the choice really is. There is a choice, but it’s not a qualitative choice. The real variety, the different crops that we used to grow have all gone. Very few people have challenged the supermarket idea that they provide choice.

IDLER: The other thing that supermarkets have managed to persuade us is that they’re cheap,

BLYTHMAN: And that’s another myth. I bought cherries from my local greengrocer the other day, and they were ��4.75 a kilo so I bought two kilos, fantastic cherries, but in Marks and Spencers down the road they were ��8 a kilo. The mark-up is staggering on fruit and vegetables.

IDLER: How do they get away with it?

BLYTHMAN: I think we just don’t challenge it, we don’t have time. But also it’s quite cunning. Supermarkets sell cherries, for example, in 350 gram packs and they seem bigger than they are. When you get them home and you take the lid off you can’t believe how few cherries are actually in there. But they’ll have a few things, like bananas, which will be really cheap to help create the idea that everything else is. Unless you buy the really heavily processed foods, things like baked beans, you’ll find that supermarkets are actually much more expensive than small shops and markets.

IDLER: I get my shopping from Sainsbury’s every week. I want to go to markets but I never seem to have the time. I live quite near Borough Market and I go there sometimes but that always seems to be really expensive.

BLYTHMAN: London’s different from other places because you don’t have such huge supermarkets, at least not in the centre anyway. If you go somewhere like Hull you’ll find that they dominate the town.

IDLER: When we were working on Crap Towns we’d get sent emails from people saying, “these supermarkets come in, it decimates the town centre, it rips the heart out of the community,” but in their adverts the supermarkets try and give the impression that they’re part of the community.

BLYTHMAN: It’s really disingenuous. In medieval times the centre of civilisation, the big populated areas, was the cathedral and now it’s the shopping centre. And have you noticed how they always have very pretentious architecture?

IDLER: I went on a road trip after Crap Towns came out and visited a place called South Woodham Ferrers which is essentially Asdatown. The weird thing was that the town itself was empty, there wasn’t a soul around. But I went into the ASDA and it was packed!

BLYTHMAN: Because there’s nothing else to do. Going back to farmers markets, I think Borough market, from what I hear, is a bit self-consciously “cool”.

IDLER: Yeah, it’s a bit like that.

BLYTHMAN: I go to Scottish farmers’ markets and they’re not like that at all. You tend to get the slightly hippyish hill-walking vegan who’s about ninety but looks sixty. But then you get lots of parents with young children, who are obviously put off by the supermarkets’ lack of quality and high prices. Farmers’ markets are actually quite cheap. There are waiting lists for people who want stalls at some farmers markets, some of them are turning over ten grand in a Saturday morning, it works really well. I don’t think enough people realise that farmers’ markets are a realistic alternative to supermarket shopping.

IDLER: It’s only a matter of time before the supermarkets catch up though.

BLYTHMAN: Well some of them have tried to have them in their car parks. It’s all part of this move to show that they’re not against farmers’ markets.

IDLER: The other thing is that supermarkets make great claims about the quality of the food they sell but people are more and more afraid of what they’re eating. You tell the story of the chicken that had been condemned, so a supplier pumped it full of chemicals, bleached the skin to make it look white and then dumped it…

BLYTHMAN: Yes, it turned up in a ready meal in Waitrose…

IDLER: I would never eat a ready meal now. I used to. I used to think of them as being a treat! You know: I’ve worked hard, I’m worn out, I deserve a night off cooking, so I’ll spend four quid on this thing.

BLYTHMAN: I remember as a child there was a thing called Vesta chicken curry, and I pleaded with my mother to buy me one and she refused, saying they were terrible and so on. I remember on the adverts they had really exotic looking women, belly dancing. And one night when my parents were going out she asked me what I wanted for dinner and I said Vesta chicken curry, so she said alright then, go on I’ll buy you one. And I was so excited but of course the reality was a kind of slop on a plastic tray. I had the most acute sense of disappointment and I think I’ve never got over that in many ways. I have ready meals every now and then and every time I end up thinking: Oh gosh, I would’ve been better off eating bread and cheese. On a gastronomic level it’s appalling. It’s been cooked three times, it’s got modified starch and caramel colouring, but forget all that, it’s just the fact that it’s such a miserable thing to eat. I guess what’s worrying though is that people’s point of reference is “Oh Waitrose lasagne! That’s good. That’s a nice Friday night in.” It makes you aware and you start to think where’s our culinary culture going? You wouldn’t catch the French or the Italians eating something like that.

IDLER: But we watch all these cookery programmes, we buy thousands of cookery books, is it just porn food?

BLYTHMAN: It’s gastro-porn and it’s also virtual food reality where we watch more and more food on the TV and these programmes are supposed to be consumed while we’re sitting in front of the telly eating a ready meal. There’s no evidence that cookery programmes are making people cook more. People are clearly cooking less, the average cooking time for an evening meal is twenty minutes and people think that’s going to go down to ten quite soon. If you look at the enormous amount of cookery books and the cookery book industry then there’s obviously some disjunction. It doesn’t quite add up. But again it’s another example of the food business. We think we’re interested in food but we shop exclusively in supermarkets, it’s just another part of not doing food very well in this country.

I think we’re even more dependent on supermarkets than in America. I’ve been speaking to people who are saying that even Americans can’t stomach supermarket food. Of course you’ve got the enormous places like Wal-Mart but there are more and more independent food outlets. It’s a really British thing, that addiction to supermarkets. It’s just another piece of evidence to argue that we really don’t understand food very well. Otherwise we wouldn’t allow the supermarkets to provide us with all of our food despite how they promote themselves. I mean their agenda is not good food.

IDLER: Do you think there’s much hope for the future?

BLYTHMAN: I think there is. I use the analogy that it’s like being in a bad relationship for a long time, you know, you suddenly wake up one morning and you look at the person and you think, ‘I’ve been with you for ages and actually I’ve realized this morning that I really hate you. I’m now re-running all the things that I thought I liked about you over in my mind and I’ve realised I actually hate them and they really get on my nerves’ and I think people are beginning to feel this way about supermarkets, they’re beginning to realize that there is an alternative. I think it’s on the edge and it can change. Particularly the way these enormous supermarkets just keep getting built, people are beginning to feel, “Oh my God, not another Tesco” which is the way it’s going. Every petrol station is run by Tesco, their local convenience store is run by Sainsbury. I don’t think that British consumers are up for that, even if they don’t care about food, or they don’t know about food very much. I mean you must have come across this in Crap Towns, people care very much about the High Street, their locality, and their town not being exactly the same as every other town, it’s so alienating being in a place which is just the same as every other place with a Sainsbury’s.

IDLER: We got hundreds of emails from people complaining that every town in Britain looks identical, every town could be called crap.

BLYTHMAN: I think that is something British people can get quite militant about. That might be the thing that will make people put their foot down more than anything else. People will identify supermarkets as being a huge part of that problem. But what I’m trying to do with the book is say: Yes, supermarkets have enormous power and they are doing terrible things to our food and the way we eat. But a lot of people can’t see how that is going to change. It’s going to get much worse. I’m trying to say to people, do you realise that? Are you up for that? Are you happy to let that happen? And I think that’s where we are with this book, you have to say to people: ‘We’re not going to get rid of them, but we can stop them being in control of everything we eat.’ That’s why we have to challenge the perception people have of supermarkets. One of the things I’ve tried to challenge is the idea that supermarkets are so convenient, I don’t see what’s so convenient about getting in your car and driving miles every time you want a carton of milk. What happened to the doorstep pint of milk? I get a box of fruit and veg delivered every week, it tastes great, it’s convenient and it’s better value that the supermarket.

IDLER: Maybe that’s the answer, you’ve got to prove to people that there is an alternative.

BLYTHMAN: But we’ve got to encourage the people that are hanging on, the independent shops, the butchers and bakers. We have to say “we are committed to you, we are going to make a point of supporting shops like yours”. Because we’re at a tipping point now, it may seem as though supermarkets have it all but there’s still 20% of the market that they want. Thankfully we’ve got a lot of Asian shops with alternative, fantastic produce who make a tremendous contribution to the independent sector. But if people could transfer just 5% of their total shopping budget to greengrocers, butchers and bakers it would make an enormous difference. We have to send the people that are still here a very clear message, “hang around because we want you, we value you”. Even if you only change small things, like don’t buy your newspaper from a supermarket, get it delivered. Every time you buy a bottle of wine don’t buy it from a supermarket, get it from the off license. Even shops like Oddbins and Threshers are petrified of supermarkets now. But if we don’t support these shops they will vanish and then we won’t have a choice about where we buy our food. And in whose interest is that?