Image from Orhan’s FLickr photostream.
The supermarket is an increasingly baffling place. Walking round Sainsbury’s at the weekend, I realised that my internal monologue has shifted over the years. No longer do I approach a potato or bag of coffee and think ‘oo, that looks nice…and the price is right. I’ll buy it!’. Now I’m assailed by any number of variables.
Too many calories? Suitable for vegetarians? How much sugar? Shall I get the organic version? Can I recycle the packaging? Does this count towards my ‘five a day’? Was it ethically produced? How many reward points will I get? Has it been genetically modified? Was it grown locally? Thank goodness I don’t eat meat, am not allergic to peanuts, and have no religious stipulations on my diet.
To make things worse, few of the above are black and white decisions. There is still widespread disagreement about the benefits of organic food. What counts as a ‘portion’ of fruit and veg? And how long can I stand here pondering whether shrink-wrapped apples from the UK are better than loose ones from Italy before the person waiting behind me starts tutting?
It’s no wonder our foods require so much packaging. Pretty soon every packet of rice will come with a background essay and 20-page appendix of supporting information. No doubt written in 40 languages so as not to exclude anyone.
It’s a mess, and it just got messier. A story in the Guardian today suggests that ‘food mile’ labels, that latest encumbrance upon the ethical shopper’s conscience, are useless as a measure of carbon footprint. A potato might be grown locally, but the pesticides, equipment and packaging could be sourced from all over the world. The carbon impact of getting the food from farm to shop is only 2%.
So labelling something as ‘grown in the UK’ is meaningless. But then giving the consumer all the facts is only going to cause confusion over what matters.
Please can someone work out one of those wacky scientific formulas? One that pools all the ethical elements in my second paragraph and churns out an overall score? The Annals of Improbable Research are full of calculations that tell us how to make the perfect cup of tea, or find the ideal partner. So why not a formula that can absorb all these variables and compute an overall ‘goodness’ score?
I don’t want to weigh up 10 considerations, over 50 different products. I’m lazy. If the own-brand custard creams score 73% while the McVities version achieves 85% that makes my decision easy. And it would put pressure on producers to make their goods more ethical to boost that percentage.
So, amateur mathematicians, get your (Fair Trade) thinking caps on.
Words like “organic”, “fairtrade”, etc. serve two functions. First to act as signs to the supermarket about what kind of punters are willing to pay more for a basic good (especially with those handy Nectar cards which are more sinister than brain implants), and secondly to marginally offset the nagging guilt foisted upon us by well-intentioned do-gooders.
When all this palava started, you’d get a nice warm fuzzy feeling when you bought your organic milk or your fairtrade coffee. Now though, it’s turned around. Now you feel bad if you DON’T buy the 15% dearer and 5% “better” product.
I’ve decided to go full circle. Now I only buy Sainsbury’s “basics” range, which has been working out find because it tastes better, it looks better, it’s cheaper, but best of all because I get to be an outlier on the supermarkets’ nice little plot of income vs gullibility….
This blog post resonates strongly with my own shopping experience.
I decided a while ago, rather arbitrarily, that if I had to choose I would buy organic rather than fairtrade – this has taken about half an hour off my shopping time. :)
Incidentally, I here is my ideal product. It might not be yours as the variables in your goodness equation would probably have different weightings to mine. But here it is:
ClipperTM Organic Instant Hot Chocolate
“A rich luxurious, low fat Fairtrade and organic instant hot chocolate. Just add hot water.”
A good start is to eschew supermarket shopping all together. For details of their impact on the environment, farming practice, urban planning, the climate and more see any number of books, including Not On The Label, Shopped, Climate Change Begins At Home, Tescopoly.
London, unlike much of Britain, is still bursting with veg markets, butchers, fishmongers, bakers etc who know their produce and call you ‘love’. Support them before they’re wiped out here as elsewhere by freezing cold, see-your-bones-lit sheds flogging buy-1-get-1-free cotton-wool tomatoes and rubber chicken. That folk throw 40% of away anyway…Or get an allotment and dig for victory ;-)