Supermarkets

Late afternoon on a Saturday. I look up from my textbook and realise that I'm going to have to go and buy some food. I have friends coming for dinner tomorrow and they probably don't want to eat the bit of floppy celery that constitutes the contents of the fridge.
ARGH.
Don't get me wrong, I am in love with cooking and will gladly cook for anyone who needs fed. I also welcome distraction from studying multiple myeloma and anaemias. But I hate having to go to the supermarket. There are many, many things wrong with supermarkets...

I set off with my old bags - a sticker on the back of the front door to remind me to take my own carrier bags shopping has helped reduce the number of bright orange poly bags gifted to me by that well-known purveyor of all things super and marketish. First of all, I'm in the car. I don't like being in the car. I feel guilty and dirty every time I have to drive somewhere. Which, thankfully, isn't that often. But since I am on my own for this trip and the quantity of stuff I will be purchasing is too much for one small feeble girl such as myself, I turn the key in the ignition and set off on the 5 minute journey to the nearest venue.

When I get there, there are plenty of others pulling up in the car park and walking in line towards the mothership, called home to purchase and consume. At least people are bringing their own bags, I note with some reassurance. I smile at the irony of the canvas shopping bags bearing slogans like 'Shop Local'. But I can't feel too superior, I've got mine with me too. I'm put to shame by a couple in their sixties packing their weekly shop into paniers and attaching them to their bikes for the cycle home.

Inside, the travelator talks to me. For my own safety. She very politely informs me that I should hold onto the hand rail whilst traveling.

Vegetables
First section, fruit and veg. This is where I have regular tantrums of sheer frustration at the lack of local, seasonal fruit and veg on offer. According to a couple of sources seasonal fruit and veg available in the UK in May includes asparagus, cauliflower, new potatoes, broad beans, rhubarb, kale, salad leaves, spring greens and of course, the good old parsnip. So in this well known supermarket chain, the asparagus was from Peru, the rhubarb was from holland (probably grown in one of their massive heated greenhouses), the broad beans from Kenya... I could go on. I just don't get it. WHY? WHY would you fly in asparagus from Peru when locally available asparagus is in season and totally delicious? WHY? How can it possibly make sense? It just can't possibly be easier and cheaper to fly all that asparagus all the way from the southern hemisphere, can it? Can it? And this is how the seasonal fruit and veg tantrums begin. I chuck a couple of curly leaf and round lettuce into the trolley, get a little bit annoyed that they come in cellophane bags and get on with it. I decide not to waste what remained of my sense of inner calm on questioning the price of the organic vegetables.



Honey
My most memorable supermarket tantrum was about honey. I was looking for some Scottish heather honey with which to make some honey and whisky ice cream. I went to another well-known supermarket and searched through the many, many different types of honey available. There was honey from Argentina, lavender honey from France, New Zealand Honey, South African Honey, but no Scottish heather honey. I stood in disbelief and stared at a shelf full of jars imported from literally all corners of the global and marvelled at the inability to transport local honey to the supermarket. I might have let them off (might have) if they'd had honey from the immediately local area (Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire). But no. I had to be calmed down by a gentle husband, and stroked on the back of the head until I was docile enough to make it round the rest of the aisles.

Wine
The supermarket's busy. The sun's been shining and people are wandering in from local pubs, where they've spent the day building up an odour of alchol seeping from their pores and turning a nice shade of pink. I sound really grumpy. Fair enough, it's a bank holiday, people should be having fun. Just cause I have to sit with books all day doesn't mean I should get annoyed with them. But they are clogging up the booze aisle, trying to decide how many bottles of the supermarket's own budget range spirits to buy for tonight. I push past to get the wine for tomorrow. Now, I haven't yet found any wine on the shelves from England. I love Australian, South African and Chilean wine. Especially when I can get wine that was produced under fair conditions, for a fair price and that helped develop communities in the global South. So the wine aisle is where my ethical schizophrenia of food miles vs. fair trade comes into play. Which to buy? Genuine dilemma. I want to support the local grower trading their way out of poverty under fair conditions, but I also don't want to be responsible for air or sea freight of lots of heavy bottles of wine and the carbon that this entails. I reached a decision on this last year which resulted in me limiting wine buying to France and Spain. Obviously, I'd give UK bottles a try too. Nick and I came to this conclusion when we did some research and read about the devastating impact of climate change (mainly contributed to by the rich countries on our planet) on the global South. Climate change was going to lead to further poverty and crop failure in the South, and we didn't want to be part of that. Also, I have become less convinced about the benefits of fair trade as a means to achieving social justice. But we can talk about that some other time.

Milk



Now I needed some milk. I use a lotta lotta milk. Skimmed milk cause it's the only kind I like. A few weeks ago I changed to organic. It has always been my goal to be able to afford to purchase all my food from organic sources. I found out a few years back about the ridiculous amount of hormones fed to cows to keep them producing milk and decided that it was a bit mean to the cows and a bit unhealthy for me to keep drinking non-organic milk. But the price has keep me slugging down the white stuff tainted with cow progesterone/oestrogen for the time being. That was until recently when I read the following about the non-organic dairy industry in a BBC magazine:

Whenever you require milk, the mother has to produce an offspring... If it's a male calf, it has little use in the commercial world. Females join the dairy world, but bull calves can't be milked and are uneconomical for beef production. Of the 482,000 calves born in Britain last year, 136,000 were shot at birth.

Olive Magazine

So I switched to organic. I'm not particularly squeemish about animal cruelty, but this just seemed a totally, selfish, wasteful principle. Now, my supermarket of choice today does stock organic skimmed milk, but in smaller bottles so I have to buy a few of them, thereby increasing my plastic wastage. I consider this a lesser of two evils for the time being (until the UK government gets its arse into gear about milk bottle recycling) and move on. I used to get my milk delivered from the local milkman. They didn't have organic though and I no longer have a doorstep for a milkman to leave my milk on. I could go vegan. I'd be fine with that. See the really good environmental reasons about veganism here on BBC Green Nick wouldn't. And having been forced into vegetarianism since he married me, I think that we should hold off on removing anything else from his diet for the time being. Maybe one day, I'll get my own cow. I'd like that. So would Nick. He has a weird cow fascination.

Checking Out
And so my battle continued as I browsed the aisles. I had to continue making decisions about whether or not to buy something based on its over-packing or its country of origin. And ended up not buying some things I had perceived that I needed. I doubt that I'll miss them that much. I bought a few things I hadn't intended too as a result of very careful product placement on behalf of the supermarket chain. And inevitably, my bill was bigger when I got to the till than what I had bargained.

There are plenty of other complaints I could make against supermarkets related to their buying up of land, monopolising local markets and putting small shop holders out of business. Their treatment of the farmers and producers of the goods that they sell onto us consumer mugs for inflated prices, whilst keeping market prices low.See the Tescopoly site for more info

I packaged my loot into my old, tatty reused polythene bags which are split and bursting and waddled back to the car park.

Why do I still Go to Supermarkets?

So... You might ask, why do I go to the supermarket if I dislike it so much. Aren't there alternatives? Yes there are. So why don't I go off to the hippy grocery stores and stop moaning. The reason is simple. Price. I already have 5 years of student debt and another 2 years to go. But I promise myself every single time that I leave that place that as soon as either one of us starts earning a wage, we'll never darken the door of this or any other supermarket ever again. And I do try and get some of my stuff from more ethical sources wherever possible.

I am usually more radical about these things, so I find myself somewhat surprised that I still give into the cheap prices and convenience of the evil supermarket dominators of the world. Usually price is not a problem. I'll pay the extra, bankrupting myself until I'm happy that my actions will not be having a negative impact on the people who produced goods for me or for the world as a whole. If it was solely down to me, I suppose I would get on my bike, buy some decent sized panniers, head to Chorlton, stock up on local produce at Unicorn Grocery Store, hand over a much larger wad of cash, buy maybe one third of what I buy now cause that's all I could afford, be a bit hungry and have my conscience eased. But I don't make decisions like that on my own any more, and all this is part of a large and beautiful compromise known as marriage. Nick is equally outraged by the food miles represented on the supermarket shelves, the packaging and is even starting to consider animal cruelty (he's a big fat carnivore, but i'm working on him), but has a stronger awareness of our financial responsbilities. He's also hungrier than me and most likely wouldn't survive on what we could afford to buy at more ethical venues.

So, there we go. Excuses given. I'm not convinced by a single one of them and long for an income with which to make better choices and a patch of ground to grow my own food in. Ideally, everything I ate would come from within a cyclable radius. That would fill me with satisfaction and joy. But in the coming decades, I fear it will also be necessary. We can't carry on with supermarket culture and everything it entails - plunder, pilage and destruction left behind in a trail of bargain prices, special offers and cheap junk food. We also have to rethink our concept of 'need', what we 'need' to eat and what we 'need' to buy.

You will see the word 'need ' appear throughout this post. I'm not totally unaware of how selfish it sounds. Like I said before, I don't really 'need' milk. I could go vegan. But for all of us, redefining our 'needs' is a transition, a learning curve... and one that we're going to have to make quickly. You'll also have heard me contradict myself in a lot of places. I may well look make on this post in future months and years and wonder why I dithered for so long about what will then seem like obvious choices and endless possibilities for an alternative method of living.

I'm getting there.