Bad Food Britain by Joanna Blythman

Author:Joanna Blythman [Blythman, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007382118
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2006-03-18T05:00:00+00:00

11

FEAR OF FOOD

For the vast majority of Britons, choosing food is a simple exercise. The drill is as follows. You buy all your food in your preferred supermarket – usually the nearest to home. You routinely select the same best-selling brands as most other consumers. You do not think too much about what goes into your trolley, other than you expect that it should be cheap (because cheapness is Britain’s paramount food shopping goal). Your habits are fairly constant; the odd food scare here or scandal there does not bother you much because you share a herd mentality, a safety in numbers philosophy. Sudan 1 and Bird flu are mere storms in a teacup that will blow over sooner or later, just like mad cow disease and salmonella before them, leaving you to get on with eating what you did before. Eating the same as everyone else makes you feel secure. You subscribe to the dominant British bad food consensus, so you will consume pretty much anything, providing it is cheap and ubiquitous, because to do so is considered middle of the road and normal. For you, food shopping may be mind-numbingly boring, but at least it is relatively stress-free and undemanding. No mental effort goes into your shopping decisions. The physical challenge is getting round the supermarket and out again as quickly as possible.

The same cannot be said for the minority of Britons who try to engage more actively with issues surrounding what they eat. They are high on a volatile, stress-inducing cocktail of food scares, conflicting health claims and contradictory diet advice. As journalist Mimi Spencer wrote:

‘We are, it seems, a Mad Food Nation – in a state of constant anxiety. If it’s not E. coli, it’s E numbers. If it’s not pesticides, it’s food miles. If it’s not dairy, it’s dioxins. Or danger diets. Or Ronald McDonald. We’re frightened of everything. Turkey Twizzlers. Tanzanian sugar snap peas. Evil salt. Evil sugar. Evil antibiotic-resistant campylobacter. In this climate of fear, little wonder that we’re feeling a trifle bilious.’

The more Britons hear about food, the more complicated their food shopping becomes. They shop defensively, trying to protect themselves and their families from suspect, unhealthy products. If they are not fretting about additives in their children’s lunchboxes or puzzling over what mayonnaise is doing in their chocolate brownie, or worrying about whether dairy products can cause breast cancer, then they are trying to shut out nightmare footage of slaughterhouse slurry spurting into their sausages. Some of these defensive shoppers also aspire to shop ethically, at least on a piecemeal basis. They seek the comfort of knowing that they are not trashing the planet, or contributing unknowingly to the unnecessary suffering of animals, or aiding and abetting the exploitation of food producers in some far-flung place, and this gives them even more to worry about. One way or other, their food shopping trip has turned into a minefield, with automatic cautionary notices popping up in their heads that read ‘Don’t buy X, oh and while you’re at it, worry about whether you should still be buying Y and Z’.

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