'We don't need this huge detour to control the traffic, a detour in which all roads lead to the supermarket but only two of them to Silver Street.' I can see that Mike is getting annoyed by their apparent lack of interest and he issues a challenge, saying that, as yet, the townspeople aren't walking down Silver Street carrying placards and protesting. Norman wakes up. 'We don't want any of that,' he says quickly.
'We understand,' Mike goes on, 'that the traffic department looks only at traffic, not at the situation of the town as a whole.' This also rattles the mayor. Up on the wall, a wooden plaque lists the names of the mayors of Ilminster over the last twenty years. Each had held the position for only two years, scant time to oversee the arrival of a supermarket. Of the fourteen members of the council, only five are elected: the rest are co-opted by the existing members as there are not enough people willing to stand for the posts. Many of the crucial decisions were taken before Norman's time in office, but they are the decisions that the council seems determined to stand by and I don't feel optimistic that anyone, or anything, is going to change their mind.
'This plan is going to split the town in two,' Mike says.
'We don't see that,' Norman replies. 'We believe that the supermarket will bring increased numbers of people to the town and that they will come into the old town after visiting the store. It will help the town, not detract from it.'
Tesco currently takes 30 percent of the country's grocery spend and its sales have gone up by 23 percent in the past two years. There is no evidence in any study I have seen that a single supermarket has actually boosted the local economy.
Bryan turns to me and asks if I will tell the mayor some of the statistics that the New Economics Foundation has published in the last few years about the impact of supermarkets on market towns. I rattle off the main findings: £10 spent in a local shop puts £25 back in the economy, £10 spent in a supermarket puts back only £14. Profits go to head office and are never ploughed back into the town. All sorts of other businesses, such as key-cutters, small printers and local accountants, pay the price along with the shopkeepers. Supermarkets can afford to drop prices for as long as it takes to hound out competition. I add that their financial clout is so huge that anything that can be done to help level the odds needs to be done and, on that basis alone, the road scheme must be reconsidered.
'We listened and it is right that we listened,' Norman says, after Mike and I have finished. 'But the whole scheme was the subject of full discussion. As far as everyone is concerned we have the best answer to our main concern - keeping the town alive - and that needs to be appreciated. Out of courtesy we have listened to your objections and we will give your proposals some thought. But can we go back on planning? How can we take this idea forward?'
Bryan points out that, for him, the number of people actually visiting his shop is critical. Only one out of every five people who goes into Lane's actually buys something, and that can be a £1.50 greeting card or a £400 garden bench. 'What will hurt the town is the slow chipping-away, and it doesn't take much. People are anxious. What would happen if one of the banks decided to close down? The others would too,' he says.
Norman brings the meeting to an end by saying he has an appointment to meet his wife for a cup of coffee before going to Lane's to buy a birthday present. 'I'm telling you after the meeting, Bryan,' he adds, 'so you didn't think I was trying to bribe you.'
I go to visit Colin Rolfe in Chard. He lives in a modern development on the edge of town, in a red-brick corner house. There's a barbecue outside the front door. Inside, Zoe and her mum are watching Narnia on a video she describes as 'dodgy'. On the kitchen table Colin has laid out papers, labels and packets of Tesco's ham. He talks me through the process. Hygrade buys pigs at 'best price', and if they're not available at the best price in the UK then they are bought from other EU countries. They're butchered at Beechings in Chard and then, if there's an oversupply, or if Tesco have suddenly decided they don't need so much ham that month, the pork is sent to Taunton, where it's stored and frozen at Novacold. It is sent back to Chard either when there is a shortage of meat or when it's over ten months old. Under law, the pork from the dead pigs has to reach your shopping basket within a year of the animal's demise. It is generally the case that what we buy in the supermarkets labelled as 'fresh meat' can be anything from thirty-five days to eleven months old.
Colin explains to me what happens in the factory. Once there, the hams are dunked in vast vats which inflate the meat with water, at the same time adding salt, dextrose, stabilisers such as diphosphates, triphosphates, and polyphosphates, and the antioxidants sodium ascorbate and the preservative sodium nitrate. The hams are tumbled around in these vats of chemical solution for one hour continuously, then for ten minutes on, fifty minutes off, for another twenty-four hours. The minimum time the meat spends in the stainless steel tumblers is thirty-six hours, the maximum is five days. The resulting hams are cooked to a temperature of lO.5°C for two minutes, then cooled to less than 5 degrees. Then they're bagged up and can be stored for another twenty-eight days. After that, the hams are taken out of their bags and roasted at 250°C for a minimum of thirty minutes, cooled again, and refrigerated for up to two days. Colin gives me a copy of the internal flow diagram for pre-sliced ham and I notice that at this point on the list of what-to-do-and-when, the ham ceases to be described as 'meat' or 'legs' and becomes simply 'product'. The product is then transferred from the fridge to a spiral slicing machine. The hock bone is removed and a cutter whizzes round in endless circles, slicing off pieces of what will be sold as 'fresh ham'. The product is then vacuum packed and each pack is inflated with preservative gases. The check-list notes that 'each pack is inspected for seal integrity'.
'That bit's important,' Colin tells me. 'Once you break the seal, you may have only a couple of days left. When you buy ham, you think you're buying something fresh; in fact, you're buying something that is right at the very end of its usable life.'
Our talk turns to Hygrade, where the union attempts to increase redundancy payouts have, so far, come to nothing. A £500 relocation payment has been offered to any workers who need to move house to find new employment, an offer that Colin says would be a joke, were it not so serious. So far, twenty-two of the workforce of 305 have found new jobs, even though taking the jobs means they don't qualify for the redundancy of £290 per year of work.
'We're all taking any jobs we can find,' Colin says. 'The food industry is menial and specialised. What can someone who has worked in Hygrade since they were a teenager, shoving bits of pork into stainless steel drums, actually do? Not much.' Colin's been offered a job with the union: it won't pay well but he knows he is lucky. He shows me a document that he's got hold of - 'Don't ask me how!' - which outlines plans for the relocation of the company. It sets out the dates and the stages when works are to be completed and demonstrates clearly that Tulip's primary concern is not to miss a single day's production. There are two corporate logos at the top of the page: Tulip on the left-hand corner, Tesco on the right.
Zoe has been out shopping with her mum and her youngest son, Jack. They arrive back with twenty carrier bags which they dump on the kitchen floor. Astonishingly, they've been to Tesco. Jack has a small plastic bag containing a colouring book and set of cheap, waxy crayons: Tesco's Easter offering to kids. After the announcement in March that there would be a competition inquiry into supermarket chains, Anatole Kaletsky, writing in The Times, noted that 'anyone who has tried to find anything worth eating in the garish monoculture of a Tesco "convenience store" will surely pray that some deus ex machina will save what is left of the small greengrocers, butchers and delicatessens that Tesco, in particular, seems determined to eradicate from Britain's high streets'. But, he goes on to say, 'hopes of reining in the big four through regulation are almost certainly forlorn. Tesco's depredations will not - and from a legal standpoint cannot - be stopped by the Competition Commission or the Office of Fair Trading. Controlling planning, liberalisi
ng parking, banning deliveries by articulated lorries or enforcing rent controls to support small shops artificially are all measures that might nibble away at the growth of the megastores. But,' Kaletsky concludes, 'none will work. Only consumer choice has a real hope of cracking the supermarket monoculture. If people genuinely value local shops they must be prepared to pay higher prices for the goods they sell. They must be prepared to resist the blandishments of the cut-price retail chains and distinguish between those that offer quality and socially responsible behaviour, as opposed to merely competing on price.'
When I was editing the Daily Express my boss, the Labour peer Clive Hollick, invited Terry Leahy, CEO of Tesco, to lunch. In the retailing world Leahy is a god, and I could tell that Clive was hoping that his magic might rub off on the Daily Express. At the time we met, in 2000, the Express was struggling with its sales, constantly being beaten into second place in the mid-market by the might of the Daily Mail. Like the Mail, Tesco was just getting bigger, seemingly by the hour. Leahy had taken the helm from his predecessor, the flamboyant Lord McLaurin, who went on to become the chair of the MCC. He told us that when McLaurin took over, Tesco was playing second fiddle to Sainsbury's. Thinking about Sainsbury's dominated the thinking of the Tesco executives: if they produced a new product, be it a single variety of yoghurt or a whole product range, Tesco did so too. If they dropped their prices, Tesco followed suit. McLaurin's first command was to 'forget Sainsbury's'. He said he didn't want to see the Sainsbury's name on any documents, or hear about the company in any meetings. From now on, Tesco was going to do its own thing. It worked. When McLaurin retired Leahy took over a company that was already winning. Leahy's masterstroke was the introduction of the loyalty card: until then, only Green Shield Stamps had rewarded customers for continued business. Other companies now started copying Tesco.
I remember Leahy as a middling sort of man: middling height, middling looks, unflashy clothing and a quiet turn of phrase. He was likeable and self-contained. No, he wouldn't do an interview with his brother (who ran a corner store in their home town of Liverpool); indeed, he wouldn't do an interview at all. His personal life was just that; his politics were private. Tesco always supported the government of the day, regardless. He'd driven in from his office in Cheshunt, north London, a journey that takes well over an hour on agood day. Not for Leahy a flash West End office. He works where he lives, where his customers shop. Every year, he spends two weeks working in one of his stores; he is so anonymous that even his own staff fail to recognise him. I wondered what he did with all the money he reputedly earns: his home is modest, his kids have been to state schools, his wife is a GP in the NHS, he drives himself to work in the morning. The first job of his life was as a shelf-stacker for Tesco and he's never left. My friend Chris Blackhurst, who was then the deputy editor of the Express and also a guest at the lunch, later told me that Leahy regards Tesco as his religion. By 2006 it's become a religion that is taking over the world: they're the fourth largest company in Thailand, the ninth in Hungary. They're in Japan and looking at China. Leahy told us he was confident that he gave his customers what they wanted, and in 2004 he told Chris that he thought it 'right to fight the farming and corner-shop lobbies'. Some farmers can't match the quality he demands and corner shops go out of business anyway. Tesco is the biggest customer of British farming and the creator of over 100,000 jobs.
Over lunch in the Express boardroom, high up on the sixth floor of our Blackfriars office, overlooking the bustling life of the River Thames, I asked him what advice he would give the Express in its war for the middle ground of Britain. Our situation was comparable to the Tesco/Sainsbury's stand-off that Leahy and McLaurin inherited a few years earlier. He didn't hesitate: 'Stop thinking about the Daily Mail. Beyour own masters. Don't mention the Mail, don't even read the Mail. You're doomed every time you make a comparison.' It made incredibly good sense, but it was insufficient to save us; five years later, as I sit in Colin's kitchen watching Zoe unpack the contents of the bulging Tesco carrier bags into the cupboards, I look around to see if I can see a newspaper. Sure enough, there is a Daily Mail lurking under a pile of papers on a chair in the corner.
That same evening, Bryan goes to a meeting of the council to try to repair the bad feeling that exists between the town council and the Chamber of Commerce over the Ilminster in Bloom campaign: both sides feel the other should have done more to support the annual initiative. The meeting doesn't go as he hoped. Norman Campbell, the mayor, after gratefully acknowledging that the chamber will be throwing its weight behind the floral bonanza, announces that he thinks that the issue of the one-way street should be looked at again. 'There is a strong feeling we have not got the ideal solution for the town. I feel that out of courtesy we should explore whether the mechanisms for re-opening this debate are in place.'
Bryan is surprised and delighted but Norman's open-minded approach is instantly rejected. 'It sets a precedent to go back too soon,' says Councillor Richard Jacobs. Mike Henley, another councillor, adds that 'it would undermine the credibility of the council . . . We will be going down a very slippery slope because we will take all credibility from decisions made by this council in the future.'
Only one councillor, Margaret Excell, speaks up for Bryan. 'Some councillors become entrenched once they have made a decision. I can't see any harm revisiting it. When you actually talk to the people of Ilminster they think this is a travesty.'
Bryan feels marginalised and humiliated. 'The whole situation stinks,' he tells me. We're sitting by the desk at the back of Lane's Garden Shop; a new shipment of terracotta pots from the Far East is cluttering up the floor. Shoppers are few and far between. 'There is no reason why they could not have given the issue another hearing. Those councillors are guilty of doing their best to wreck the commercial viability of the town for the independent shopkeepers.' He and Mike Fry-Foley have decided to call an open meeting of the town directly after Easter to try to force the council to re-open the debate.
When they're five days old, Bluebell's piglets venture outside for the first time. They walk with delicate little steps, picking up their hooves and putting them down warily, still uncertain of the ground beneath their feet. Bluebell has become much more protective and when the piglets are outside, she walks backwards and forwards in front of them, keeping us away. She also checks us out more assiduously, subjecting any visitor to a thorough sniff of hands, boots and trousers. On the far side of the fence the other sows watch the piglets keenly. Babe, Guinness, Collette, Cordelia and the incredibly fat Bramble follow their every move, standing in a line like a group of young mums in the playground, clucking over the antics of their kids on the swings. Once Bluebell had given birth, Robinson, the saddleback boar, had to be moved out of the main pen and into the rescue chickens' run, along with Lonesome George. It is a temporary residence while new fencing is erected, but with four more pigs already pregnant we don't need another, and Robinson will have to live alone for a few weeks. He spends his days lying on the ground, belly towards the sun, only bothering to stir to escape the shifting shadows as the hours pass. Two days after Robinson joins the chickens, Bob goes into the hen house to collect any eggs that had been laid outside the nesting boxes. He finds the lengths of wood which the chickens use to perch on at night thrown every which way across the floor. All the straw which he scattered over the floor the night before has been pushed into a pile in one corner. Bob puts the perches back up, but when it happens again the next night it becomes clear that, despite his bulk, Robinson is managing to get through the small, chicken-sized doorway in the side of the hen house. Once inside, he's been shovelling the straw into one corner and using it for his own bed, leaving the chickens to spend the night on the floor. Definitely a budding Napoleon of the farmyard.
'Six pigs: minimum £600. Max: £1,200.' I write this down in my notebook under the heading, 'Now we are pig breeders.' In 1862, the American government passed the Homestead Act, which entitled migrating families to 160 acres
of land in the Midwest. The land would be theirs for good provided they spent the first five years farming. Within a decade, millions of immigrants from Germany, Scandinavia, Scotland and Ireland occupied 300,000 square miles of middle America. To make ends meet and to payoff the starter loans they needed crops that made quick money. The answer was to grow corn and keep pigs, and by 1880 there were 50 million hogs in the Midwest.
The economics went like this: a good sow could be bought for $5. With proper care, she could produce five or six breeding gilts a year who would farrow in their turn the next season. In the third year, the sows could be sold at market for $30 and the farmer still had his original pig, who was still breeding. It was a farmer's best, most reliable investment and pigs soon had the nickname of 'mortgage-lifters'. All too often, 'hog-money' was all that stood between the farmer and the demands of the local bank. If he had pigs, he could afford a few cattle. The pigs would be turned out on to the standing corn in the autumn: they'd feed themselves on the stalks, root up all that was left, fertilise and plough up the land and leave it ready for planting in the spring. This labour-saving device was known as 'hogging down'.
Today the value of pigs in the USA is over $5 billion, contributing to the worldwide need for 75 million tonnes of pork and 2 billion pounds of lard every year.
Four days after the discovery of the dead swan in Cellardyke, the bird flu scare is over. Scientists discovered that the bird had most likely contracted the disease in Europe and died as it attempted to migrate across the North Sea. Andre Farrar, a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, says it 'looked like this was a whooper swan that spent the winter in Europe, set off on its migration, got halfway across the North Sea, felt like crap, and landed and died before washing up in Cellardyke. It can put the spring back into people's step because it makes it much less likely that other positives will be found.'
Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Page 19