Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  Some months after my visit to Brogdale, I found myself chatting to Peter Clarke, a farmer who spent most of his career in the international fruit and veg trade but found that he missed the hands-on experience of growing food himself. We’re standing shivering in Sainsbury’s car park on the Finchley Road, where Peter comes every Wednesday during the summer with a vanload of lettuces, cabbages, beans and broccoli (plus more types of radish and beetroot than I even knew existed) to sell at the farmers’ market. His farm is just within the M25 – ideal for supplying London – and he’s doing reasonably well at it, although life is one continuous slog, spent driving to different markets four days a week and farming the other three. I ask him why, with all this mind-boggling variety of vegetables in their car park, Sainsbury’s have so few apple varieties on sale inside their store. I explain that I’ve just been to Brogdale, and can’t quite get the taste of Ashmead’s Kernel out of my head. ‘Ah yes,’ says Peter, ‘that reminds me of a farmers’ meeting I went to once. There was a guy there who’d come to persuade us to try growing some traditional apple varieties. People were just starting to get interested, when one old farmer got up at the back of the room and said that that was all very well, but old varieties were like old girlfriends: very exciting when you first met them again after a long time, before you remembered why you dumped them in the first place.’

  It seems that we are doomed to a future of ubiquitous Golden Delicious, not because they’re either golden or delicious (they’re neither), but because they perform spectacularly well in all the areas that other, tastier apples don’t. They’re steady croppers, they can be picked early, they store easily, they travel well and – most importantly – they can be grown in both the northern and southern hemispheres, so can be made available all year round. Supermarket customers get upset, apparently, if they have to change the variety of apple they buy from season to season. Since for some reason most people don’t seem to object to Golden Delicious’s mushy, sugary blandness, it makes the perfect commercial apple. Granny Smiths, another commercial favourite, have similar handling and cropping properties that outweigh their cannonball-like hardness and searing acidity. No wonder two thirds of the apple orchards in Britain have been grubbed up over the past 30 years – they were producing the ‘wrong’ sort of apple. And what goes for apples goes for every other kind of food too.

  According to Defra, 38 per cent of the food we eat in Britain is now imported. The figure includes half of all our vegetables and a staggering 95 per cent of all our fruit.3 You might assume that this is the result of our increasingly exotic tastes – the kumquatification, as it were, of everyday life – but you would be wrong. More than half the food we import into the UK is indigenous food in season: in other words, we could have grown it ourselves.4 The reason why we don’t is simple. Foreign growers, with their year-round sunshine and low-cost labour, can deliver apples and onions to us far more cheaply and consistently than we can grow them here – until they run out of water, that is, which some already are. The region of southern Spain where most of our salad vegetables are grown (under a polytunnel so large it can be seen from space) is fast turning to desert.

  After a lifetime in the fruit and veg industry, Peter Clarke is a realist. Farmers’ markets are all very well, he says, but they will never be able to feed cities. Price is what consumers care about, and only the largest retailers have the scale of operation to compete on price these days. Sainsbury’s are happy to have farmers’ markets in their car parks because they’re good for business: people come to the market to buy their novelty beetroot, and then go to the supermarket to get the bulk of their food. Within 20 years, Peter reckons, small producers in Britain will have died out altogether, apart from those who survive by selling luxury foods to people who can afford it. I leave him selling his fancy veg and head off towards Sainsbury’s myself, feeling rather guilty, and secretly hoping he can’t see me. I suspect he can’t. It is, after all, a very large car park.

  The Chain Gang

  In the modern food industry, small producers, suppliers and retailers all share the same problem. They are relics of a bygone era. Cities in the past were fed by thousands of individuals – a plethora, if you like, of Peter Clarkes – who either brought produce to market themselves, or sold it on to suppliers to take it for them. The food supply was so vitally important to cities that most had laws in place to prevent anyone from gaining a monopoly in the trade, either by getting too large a share in the market for any one food, or by operating in more than one stage of the food chain. Bakers in pre-revolutionary Paris were prevented from milling their own grain, and millers prevented from baking bread, for that very reason.

  Nothing could be further from the way cities are fed today. Most of the food we eat now is produced and distributed by vast conglomerates, described by the American social scientist Bill Heffernan as ‘food clusters’, ‘firms that control the food system all the way from gene to supermarket shelf’.5 Modern food companies don’t just deal in one aspect of the supply; they spread their operations up and down the food chain, using mergers and acquisitions to achieve so-called ‘vertical integration’ within the supply system (the very thing the eighteenth-century Parisian laws were put in place to prevent). You might not have heard of ‘food clusters’ before, but you will certainly be aware of their end product: supermarkets. Supermarkets were invented in the early twentieth century by American food processing companies looking for ways to sell their high-volume, long-life products as cost-effectively as possible. Supermarkets haven’t evolved much in their 80-year history: the first ones were boxy sheds built on the edges of towns – so the supply trucks could reach them easily – filled with rows of branded produce and surrounded by capacious car parks. Then, as now, their primary aim was not to charm people, it was to transfer industrial food as efficiently as possible from factory to consumer. They proved to be more successful at it than even their inventors could have dreamed.

  Supermarket dominance of the grocery trade in Britain first made front-page news in 2004 when Tesco’s profits hit the £2 billion mark, but really it shouldn’t have come as such a shock. Supermarkets, and the industrial food systems that supply them, have been making themselves indispensable to us for almost a century – it is only now that they have achieved their aim that we are starting to worry about the consequences. In 2006, an all-party parliamentary committee report entitled High Street Britain 2015 stated: ‘There is widespread belief … that many small shops across the UK will have ceased trading by 2015, with few independent businesses taking their place. Their loss, largely the result of a heavily unbalanced trading environment, will damage the UK socially, economically and environmentally.’6 The report went on to recommend ‘a moratorium on further mergers and takeovers until the government has brought forward proposals to secure the diversity and vitality of the retail sector’. It might just as well have said ‘Lock the stable door and start looking for the horse.’

  The disappearance of independent food shops in Britain has finally brought the state of the grocery trade to public attention, but it is just the visible tip of a very large iceberg. We might not like the corporate takeover of our high streets, but we absolutely love being able to buy fresh salmon or ready-made lasagne from a Tesco Metro or a Sainsbury’s Local at eleven o’clock at night, seven days a week. It suits our modern lifestyles. The processes that make it possible – that can conjure up a salmon from a Scottish loch, gut it, package it, and dispatch it so that it arrives in perfect condition at the same time as a lasagne with a totally different provenance – are little short of miraculous. The ability to do it, cheaply and reliably, week in, week out, in the middle of the night and out of season, is what sets supermarkets apart. Their real power lies not in their takeover of the high street, but in their control of the food supply chain. That particular horse bolted long ago.

  We’re so wedded to the year-round availability of just about everything – what the food journalist Joanna Blythman calls ‘permanent
global summertime’ – that we tend to forget the phenomenal effort that it takes to bring it to us.7 The logistics would be daunting enough were we just talking about tennis balls. Given that it’s food, they become positively mind-boggling. Food isn’t something one would naturally choose to transport very far. It is organic in the old-fashioned sense of the word, which means it goes off rather quickly unless subjected to some sort of preservation process such as drying, salting, smoking, canning, bottling, freezing, gassing or irradiating. Such processes do have their uses – champagne, cheese, bacon and kippers being some of the tastier ones – but in an ideal world, one would not salt food or blast it with gas simply in order to preserve it. One would harvest or butcher it, cook it as necessary and put it in one’s mouth – which, give or take a custom or two, is how rural communities have eaten for centuries. But getting food into cities is quite another matter. Apart from its tendency to go off, food is seasonal, squashable, bruiseable, unpredictable, irregular – the list goes on. The success of the modern food industry lies in its ability not just to provide us with hitherto unimaginable quantities of food, but to deliver it in good, or at least edible, condition. Most of it doesn’t taste as nice as it might have done straight out of the ground, but since most of us rarely eat really fresh food, we’ve forgotten what it’s supposed to taste like anyway.

  One of the ways in which supermarkets manage to keep us supplied with fresh food is by stretching the concept of what counts as ‘fresh’. New Zealand lamb, for instance, used to be shipped to Britain frozen, but is now shipped ‘chilled’, sealed in containers at minus one degree Centigrade filled with a ‘gas flush’ (an inert gas such as argon) to kill the bacteria. In this way the lamb can be kept ‘fresh’ for 90 days after slaughter, although it loses its ‘freshness’ pretty quickly once the containers are opened. The need to keep the lamb at a precise temperature creates a so-called ‘chill chain’, which in turn is changing the way our food is transported. Old-style bulk-carrying refrigerated ships, or reefers, are being replaced by vessels fitted with ‘plug-ins’: individual docking bays into which the containers are slotted, like so many patients in an intensive care unit, each with a chart to log its journey and a record of its temperature on the voyage. Any variation in the latter means that the whole cargo has to be destroyed. Once the ships reach port (which in the case of food destined for Britain is usually Rotterdam), the containers are plugged into dockside bays to await transfer across the Channel by ferry. Most food entering the UK will make several more trips before it ends up at its final destination. A recent report by Defra reckoned that British food transport accounted for 30 billion vehicle kilometres in 2002 – 10 times further than a decade earlier and the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe 750,000 times.8

  To get some idea of what these international food dodgems actually look like, I can heartily recommend a journey up or down the M1, turning off at Junction 18 and ignoring the signs to Crick. I have nothing against Crick: it is a dear little town with a neat high street, a couple of decent pubs and a resolutely old-fashioned Spar. But the real attraction of Junction 18 lies on the other side of the road. Here, just a couple of roundabouts away from the cosiness of Crick, is the landscape of modern food supply – and a very bizarre landscape it is. The ‘other’ Crick consists of what can only be described as a series of thumping great sheds: vast boxes clad in off-white crinkly tin, so featureless that only the dozens of lorries crowding their loading bays, like piglets at the belly of some monstrous sow, give any hint of their true scale. These buildings could cheerfully swallow jumbo jets; but what they are actually handling at Crick is the cereal, eggs and milk that you and I are going to eat tomorrow for breakfast, plus some 20,000 different product lines besides, in a minutely timed international distribution operation about as sophisticated as the sheds are bland to look at.

  Crick is a national food hub: one of about 70 similar sites up and down the country that between them manage the vast bulk of our food supplies. The airport-scale sheds are regional distribution centres (RDCs): vast warehouses that operate 24 hours a day, receiving thousands of pallets of food and other goods from ‘upstream’ supplier lorries, and sorting them into batches to be taken by ‘downstream’ ones to supermarkets. The pallets are manoeuvred by teams of forklift trucks and ‘pickers’ (men with electric barrows) in a constant race against the clock. Fresh food supply lorries are scheduled to arrive within half-hour time slots, with the aim of ‘cross-docking’ their goods directly into a delivery vehicle. Increasingly, food travels via specialist ‘consolidation centres’ in order to streamline the process. The entire mechanism is triggered every time you or I buy something from a supermarket, since the item’s bar code passing through the checkout sends an automatic order through to the RDC to ensure its replacement arrives just in time for the shelves to be restocked the following day. The bar codes also allow supermarkets to keep tabs on their goods, telling them when and where they are bought, and, if customers use loyalty cards, by whom.

  Since supermarkets have no on-site storage, the burden of keeping their shelves fully stocked is passed up the food chain to their suppliers – no easy task, according to Fred Duncan, director of Grampian Foods, one of the largest meat producers in the country. ‘A customer can order a hundred or a thousand cases of fresh meat,’ he says, ‘and then they can phone up on Monday morning and say they want the order doubled that afternoon. We’re frantically trying to meet that, and they penalise us like hell if we don’t.’9 The entire operation is run on a knife-edge, so any disruption to it, such as the Hemel Hempstead fuel depot fire in 2005, causes instant chaos. That fire affected only one M&S dry goods depot, but, according to Duncan, it could have been a lot worse: ‘If one depot goes down you have a complete logistical nightmare. If a Tesco’s depot went down, they’re so huge, I can’t imagine the consequences.’ Moving food around Britain is hard enough, but when you factor in the food we import from abroad every year, you have a very complex operation indeed. ‘Global trading is the future,’ says Duncan, ‘and understanding logistics is it. The timing and processing of the order – you can’t get it wrong. It’s in different languages too: you’re working in Thailand; it’s a Chinese boat; you’ve got Dutch legislation; I don’t know how it works! You wouldn’t want to think about it for too long – you’d go crazy.’

  As the name of its own research body, the Institute of Grocery Distribution (IGD), indicates, the British food retail industry is obsessed with logistics. To read the IGD’s annual report, Retail Logistics, is to wallow in the code language of a rapidly evolving industry. According to the report, 94.7 per cent of British supermarket groceries are now handled by depots like the one at Crick, an increasing number run by specialist ‘third-party logistics’ (3PL) companies, set up to cope with the complexities of international haulage. Third-party logistics is a fast-growing business: a 2005 merger between two of its major players, Exel and Deutsche Post, created a company with half a million employees and an annual turnover of £38 billion. Other hot distribution trends for 2007 included RRP (retail-ready packaging), packaging that can protect food in transit yet be displayed directly on supermarket shelves; CPFR (collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment), an industry resolution to talk to itself more; and RFID (radio-frequency identification), computer chips embedded in packaging that will eventually allow supermarkets to trace food all the way from its source and into our homes. But for now, the supermarkets’ chief goal remains on-shelf availability (OSA). Apparently the one thing that can actually lose them customers is a failure to supply us with our favourite brand of cupcake or tea bag.

  However many gizmos they employ, there is no doubt that supermarkets have got the business of food supply down to a fine art. Advanced preservation techniques and transport technology have combined to create the illusion that feeding cities is easy. It isn’t. Yet the better the food industry gets at what it does, the more we forget how much we depend on it. The reality is that supermarkets have a stra
nglehold over not just the grocery sector, but the entire infrastructure that supplies our food. Without them, we would struggle to feed ourselves; and that makes their position close to unassailable.

  This Little Piggy …

  One of the reasons it can be hard to appreciate the effort it takes to feed a modern city is the sheer invisibility of the process. Not many of us make casual trips to food hubs like Crick. Even if we wanted to, visitors are about as welcome there as they would be at a top-secret military installation. The food industry is a highly secretive operation. We live in ignorance of the 24-hour effort that keeps our lasagnes coming, and that suits the industry just fine.

  Before the railways, it was a very different story. Transporting food was often harder than growing it in the first place – no more so than for grain, every city’s staple food. Grain was too heavy and bulky to carry more than a few miles overland: a 100-mile journey by cart in Roman times is estimated to have cost half the value of the load.10 Transport by water was easier, but the grain was then exposed to the risk of rotting. Grain was also difficult and dangerous to store, prone to weevil attack and explosive if its temperature rose too high. One solution was to convert the grain to flour before it reached the city, but this added a further logistical problem, since mills ran on wind or water power, and were often inconveniently located in order to make best use of the elements. Several famines that hit Paris during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were caused not by failed harvests but by severe winters that froze the Seine and prevented the city’s watermills from operating.