Taking Stock by Roger Morgan-Grenville

Author:Roger Morgan-Grenville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Over 80% of beef sales in Britain go through supermarkets.

So the Saturday after my £1.99 burger, I find myself standing by the giant meat cabinet in the equally giant local Tesco superstore, wondering what’s new, where it came from and whether I can be tempted to buy some.

The meat in that cabinet shares whatever it can of the attention span of a consumer who has over 40,000 products to think about under that one roof, which fact in itself may be a contributor to the overall problem. I mean, try counting the things you have in your fridge, cupboards and bathroom, even in your life, and ask yourself if you really needed to choose them from 40,000. Personally, I struggle to choose one from three in normal life. Too much choice, in my experience, is sometimes more stressful than too little, and it generally leads to higher waste levels, not to mention a greater demand on the planet’s resources. Wendell Berry described the effects of this phenomenon nicely back in 1980: ‘The idea was that when faced with abundance, one should consume abundantly, an idea that has survived to become the basis of our economy.’6 Precisely. You could be forgiven for thinking that some of the big corporations rely on it.

I was clocked by the in-store security cameras long before I had finished counting and inspecting the 52 different offerings of beef and beef derivatives in that cabinet (‘Security to Aisle 4, please’, said the PA system a tad too cheerfully for my liking). And that’s not counting all the prepared meals like lasagnes that lurked in other parts of the store. The great thing about aggregating and harvesting millions of pieces of data, something that the till records and Tesco Club Card provide for them, is that they can gain in one snapshot a very clear summary of what the average British consumer requires, beefeaters included. And what they require nowadays, based on what I saw, is, in order: mince, roasting joints, diced Irish lean beef and various shrink-wrapped steaks. Consolation for the lack of detailed visible provenance (‘slaughtered in the UK’; ‘slaughtered in Great Britain’; ‘from trusted farms’; and our old friend ‘Boswell Farm’) came in the pricing, which appeared to be about 20% below the artisan butcher in our village, and in the undoubted freshness that is underwritten by a highly sophisticated supply chain. If you were a busy shopper, you couldn’t fault the choice, price and probably the quality of what was in that cabinet. With the possible exception of the shrink-wrapping, this was a good substitute for any one of the mid-price butchers that supermarkets have rather forcefully replaced over the last 30 years or so. But there remain significant issues.

Supermarkets react to, and direct, public opinion. On the one hand, they try to convince us that it is we ourselves who have demanded vegetables that conform to an exact size and shape (because it happens to make their supply chain operation easier), but on

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