A Greedy Man in a Hungry World Read online

  ‘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 grai
n 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.

  It took Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory in 1983, and the boom that followed, to solve that problem. Suddenly having money was OK. It was better than OK. In the famous words of Oliver Stone’s creation Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street, greed was good. So we spent money on houses and on cars and on shares, and on awful double-breasted suits with big shoulders and sleeves baggy enough so we could roll them up. Oh, the shame.

  Eventually we were going to need something else to spend our money on, and food was the solution. It is no coincidence that some of the key restaurants of Britain’s first restaurant boom – Bibendum, Kensington Place, The River Café and Harvey’s, with a young chef called Marco Pierre White at the stove – all opened in 1987.

  At the same time something else happened, something absolutely vital. Rupert Murdoch went to war with the print unions, to free himself from the labour restrictions that were stopping the introduction of new technology. Others had been involved in this struggle, most notably Eddie Shah, who finally launched the all-colour Today tabloid newspaper in 1986. But it was Murdoch’s decision later in the same year to lock out the unions and move production of his papers – the Sun, the News of the World, The Times and the Sunday Times – from Fleet Street to a wholly new computerized plant in Wapping which changed everything for the newspaper business. It made the industry cheaper. It made it quicker. And it made the newspapers bigger. Suddenly, printing multiple sections was not only doable. It was necessary. After all, the economy was booming and advertisers were gagging to buy space. There was only one problem: what the hell to put in that space?

  The success of glossy magazines like ID and The Face, launched in the early eighties, alerted older national newspaper editors to something their younger magazine brethren had long known: there was this thing called lifestyle, and it sold copies. These newspaper supplements quickly filled up with pages of property, fashion and, of course, food. There is an assumption that there have been restaurant critics on Britain’s national newspapers for decades. It’s not so. Jonathan Meades was one of the first to be appointed, to a column on The Times, but not until 1986. Likewise, today the profession of restaurant PR is firmly established. However did we get by without them? Presumably restaurants used to just unlock the doors and wait for people to come and be fed.

  The first public relations man solely dedicated to the dark arts of promoting restaurants and chefs was a former music business PR with a mop of blond hair, a neat line in patter and a taste for the hard stuff. Alan Crompton-Batt single-handedly invented the restaurant PR industry in 1987 when he began pushing a young Yorkshire-born cook with lots of black hair, piercing eyes and a talent for rock-star antics called Marco Pierre White. If Marco hadn’t existed it’s entirely possible those acres of newsprint crying out for content would have had to invent him. Indeed, it’s arguable they actually did. And quickly this spread from print to television. Where once food on TV was presented by essentially domestically orientated cooks and food writers like Fanny Craddock and Delia Smith, suddenly there was a bunch of intense-looking men in whites emerging from behind their restaurant ranges. Take Six Cooks, three series of which ran on the BBC in the mid- to late eighties, introduced the British public to a whole new set of combustible, distinctly uncosy personalities like Raymond Blanc, Nico Ladenis, Marco, and a very young Gary Rhodes.

  Witness the birth of the celebrity chef. Britain’s food revolution was under way.

  Britain’s supermarkets were brilliantly placed to cash in on it. A classically Thatcherite relaxation of the planning laws, combined with an abundance of capital on the markets, had enabled the biggest supermarkets to grow and prosper. They abandoned city centres where there was not enough space – many of the original self-service supermarkets were in disused cinemas, the only buildings big enough to accommodate them on the high street – for purpose-built retail sheds on the edges of residential areas. With this expansion came a greater responsiveness. If a big-name cook named a must-have ingredient on TV, the supermarkets could have it on the shelves within days.

  Over the years Delia Smith has moved the market in liquid glucose, cranberries, and even something as basic as eggs. In more recent years supermarkets have rushed to stock ingredients as diverse as crab, rabbit, fresh herbs and wild mushrooms in response to recipes from the likes of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Gordon Ramsay and Nigella Lawson.

  But the relationship between big-name chefs and the supermarkets goes much further. Many chefs like Rick Stein or Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall may well make a point about the imperative to support local food producers and suppliers. Rick Stein has included at the back of some of his books long lists of contact information for these suppliers. The implication – and sometimes the overt message – is that the spread of supermarkets is something that must be resisted. And yet, increasingly, it is the very same supermarkets which are responsible for making these books best-sellers. Publishers are unembarrassed about it. They will tell you this: unless a big, glossy cookbook from a big, glossy Celeb Chef has supermarket support, it simply will not do well. As to the supermarkets, they really don’t care what message is being handed out as long as it sells. In 2004 Felicity Lawrence’s Not on the Label, which took absolutely no prisoners in explaining the evils of supermarkets, began selling so well that Tesco simply couldn’t resist. They just had to start stocking it. And so the sales increased even further.

  This is the reality. It is fashionable to slag off supermarkets (even as, sheepishly, we slope off to them to do our weekly shop). It seems no discussion of British food culture can ever be complete unless it includes a complete trashing of the awfulness of these food retail leviathans. And yet, if they did not exist, if they were not such sophisticated, complex, customer-focused businesses, the food revolution of which this whole discussion is a part simply wouldn’t have happened. They have become a vital part of our national life, and have benefited us hugely.

  And all of this would be a glorious and marvellous thing. We should be moved to write prose poems about our supermarket sector, compose rousing anthems, erect monuments in its honour. We should, at the very least, be hugely thankful for what we have and its impact on the modern way of life. Were it not for one thing, which is …

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  SUPERMARKETS ARE EVIL

  The spring of 2011 in Britain was marked by an unusually warm, sunny spell of blue skies and soft breezes, and in the plum orchards of Kent the white blossoms bloomed full and heavy. It promised a solid harvest with yields up on the year before. There would, as there had so often been, be lots of domestic plums to meet demand. Britain is good at growing plums. Which is not really surprising. We have been growing them for a very long time. There is evidence of plums being used in cookery during the Roman occupation. By the medieval era they were so dominant that the word ‘plum’ had become a synonym for all sorts of dried fruits, the famed plum pudding served at the Victorian Christmas a mark of its lasting popularity.

  Certainly when the technologists for the major supermarkets began talking to plum farmer Peter Kedge early in 2011, he was able to reassure them that he would have lots and lots of fruit for them to buy, punnet after punnet of Marjorie’s Seedling, Reeves and Victoria, as much as 260 tonnes. The technologists monitor the levels of produce supply, to ensure the big multiples can keep their shelves stocked. ‘The message I was getting back from the supermarkets was that they could take everything we would grow,’ says Kedge, who has been a farmer of apples and plums since 1988, when he joined his wife’s family business. ‘Mind you,’ he says with a weary air, ‘they always say that.’ Even so, early in 2011 Kedge had no reason to think the harvest would be anything other than a roaring success.

  And it might have been were it not for an 83-year-old woman, who was admitted to hospital in the north-west German state of Lower Saxony on 15 May, suffering from bloody diarrhoea. On Saturday 21 May she died, becoming the first of fifty people across Europe – more than forty of them in Germany – to lose their lives to a virulent strain of shiga toxin-producing E. Coli. It’s a complicated name for a vicious bug that shreds your kidneys and turns your blood poisonous. As well as the fifty deaths there would be 4,000 other serious cases across Europe, an outbreak that initiated the scientific version of a manhunt for a serial killer. Like all proper detective stories the search came complete with blind alleys, false leads and undeserving suspects. Prime among the innocent were cucumbers from Spain which, on 26 May, were fingered as the cause by German health officials. The next day a Europe-wide alert was issued calling for the withdrawal from sale of all organic Spanish cucumbers. Shortly afterwards the Robert Koch Institute, the German state body with responsibility for disease control and prevention, issued guidance warning against the consumption of not just cucumbers but also raw tomatoes and lettuce. It was a bad month for salad.