UK: Budget Food
January 19th, 2009In the “developed” world, poor people are victims of their own ignorance and bad habits as they are of the predatory nature of the confetti currency system. I’ve seen the way poor people eat in various parts of the “developed” world and that diet, in my opinion, represents a death sentence; a program of genocide in slow motion.
How can it be that so many poor people, on different parts of the planet, are buying essentially the same highly processed pap with whatever money they have?
Television.
Poor people watch a lot of television and television is how poor people learn to make bad choices about food (and money management in general).
The author of the piece below is TOTALLY aware of the fact that many poor people make stupid choices that perpetuate their poverty, and many of those stupid choices revolve around food:
Let’s be clear. A 25% meat pie is still not a fabulous item. Nor would Blumenthal and I have swooned over a 54% pork sausage. Likewise, we can lecture those in dire straits on the need to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables – where the value ranges happen to score well – though patronising people who are struggling to make ends meet has always left me with a nasty taste in the mouth. The fact is that the items I have looked at are invariably going to be a part of the diet, and that leads to simple questions of respect; of the supermarkets, which do so well out of us in good times, not forcing the very poorest to eat dross when the bad times come.
Poor people are invariably going to make bad choices about what they eat?
This is exactly the same type of system maintenance that’s practiced on Ted Kaczynski’s Ship of Fools (cache). Sure, give poor people a few more scraps of meat in their pie. Doing this might keep poor people just fat and happy enough to sit back and enjoy the rest of the voyage to oblivion.
Don’t question the social engineering that’s behind all of this. Don’t empower people by teaching them how to produce some of their own food; which would enable them to avoid the industrial slop for sale from the Ministry of Nutrient Agar. Nope. Petition for an extra blanket and more cocksucking freedoms as the ship of fools sails onward.
(Read the Ted K essay if you don’t understand the last sentence.)
Via: Guardian:
Not long ago I sat down with the multi-Michelin-starred chef Heston Blumenthal to taste-test products from the supermarkets’ value ranges, the very cheapest of the cheap, the lowest of the low. It was a truly humbling experience. As we studied the prices, all of them measured in pence rather than pounds, we swiftly concluded that whatever aesthetic considerations we might want to bring to bear – did this stuff taste nice? Was it well made? – were irrelevant. Nobody bought these products because they liked them; they bought them because economic circumstance forced them to do so.
Never was that more true than now. Anyone looking for a marker of recession could do worse than go loiter in the value-range aisles of their local supermarket. Hell, you might even be shopping there – and you won’t be alone, because supermarket shopping habits are changing. In the past year sales of own-label premium ranges have dropped by more than 6%. Sales of organic products have dropped nearly 15%. Value-range sales, on the other hand, have leapt by 46%.
So what exactly is it they are buying? I happen to know. For the past few months I have been investigating the realities of cheap supermarket food for an edition of Dispatches, to be screened on Channel 4 this week – and it really ain’t pretty. What would you say to a beef pie that was only 18% beef, and a few more percentage points “beef connective tissue” – or gristle, collagen and fat, as it’s more commonly known? How about a pork sausage that’s just 40% pork, with a slab of pig skin chucked in for bulk? Or an apple pie with so little apple – a mere 14% – that you can’t help but wonder whether it really deserves the name? I suspect, like me, you would say, “No thanks.”
Then again, I have a choice. I don’t have to buy cheese slices with half the levels of calcium of the more expensive variety or chicken breasts that have been bulked up with 40% water to give you the impression you are getting more for less. The people who are buying these products generally don’t have that choice. They have to take what the supermarkets deign to give them. Which raises the question: is what the supermarkets give them good enough?
Only the most callous could argue that it is. This is not born of some conviction that all supermarkets are Evil as the foodie Taliban like to claim. Sure, they aren’t perfect. The economies of scale that help them to keep prices low mean they can sometimes exert undue pressure on producers. Their impact on small local shops can be devastating. But they provide a level of convenience that serves hard-pressed families – in which time is short because both parents have to work to make ends meet – very well. They have opened up the range of ingredients available to us and helped to foster a debate on where our food comes from.
In return we have rewarded them with an exceptionally light regulatory regime that has enabled the likes of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons and the new breed of discounters – Aldi, Lidl and Netto – to be amazingly successful. Their share of this country’s £120bn retail food market has risen from less than 20% in the 1980s to more than 70% now. But with that unfettered access to the market must come responsibilities – and surely that should include improving the quality of the food sold to the very poorest in society.
We can fight long and hard about what the word “quality” means. The supermarkets argue that their value ranges aren’t in any way harmful and point out – rightly – that in recent years great efforts have been made to reduce the levels of things such as salt and sugar in very cheap bread. The age of rickets is over. But that still leaves them selling products that contain animal products the vast majority of us would actually throw away rather than cook with. Pig skin is apparently quite high in protein, but would you really choose to have it minced up and put in your sausages simply because it’s cheap?
Furthermore, is it outrageous to suggest that the supermarkets should absorb the costs of making these improvements? They make huge profits. Morrisons, for example, made £583m this year. Sainsbury’s is behind but has a still sizable £239m. And Tesco, the market leader, has just posted more than £1.8bn worth, despite the tough economic climate. Indeed, their ability to make money has proved remarkably consistent. New research commissioned by Dispatches and carried out by John Thanassoulis, lecturer in economics at Oxford University, has found that the profit margins of the big supermarkets have remained surprisingly steady for decades at around 5%, not just in the good times but during recessions of the sort we’re experiencing now as well. Thanassoulis even found evidence that margins actually go up during economic downturns.
In short, they can afford to take the hit – because it really wouldn’t cost much at all. I asked a food technologist, David Harrison, who has huge experience of the mass-market food business, to re-engineer some standard value-range products. I didn’t want him to make a gourmet beef pie. That would be easy. Just throw money and some quality sirloin at the problem. I wanted to make a better pie, keeping within reasonable financial parameters. He started by analysing all the cheapest pies on the market and found that, on average, they had just 18% beef plus a few more percentage points of that connective tissue. (It can go much lower. I came across a minced beef and onion pie that declared a beef content on the label of just 7%.)
Harrison upgraded our generic recipe to produce one that had no connective tissue and 25% beef. The extra cost, to increase the meat content by 38%? A penny a pie. To remove the pig skin from a budget pork sausage and lift the meat content from 40% to 54% cost 0.7p per sausage. To increase the amount of apple in an apple pie by more than 40% cost 0.8p. As the cost of raw ingredients is only a quarter of the finished product’s retail price, these really are tiny amounts. All of these improvements, even represented as double-digit percentages, may look marginal but the differences in the finished product are discernible. In a series of blind taste tests that I conducted, the overwhelming majority of people identified our new improved products and preferred them. And if that sounds like banal advertising patter, so be it.
Obviously companies need to make money, or they wouldn’t be able to invest in their business, which in turn means they wouldn’t be able to serve their customers. But if absorbing the expense to make these improvements meant Tesco’s profits went from that £1.8bn to, say, £1.77bn, if Morrison’s made not £583m but £570m, who exactly would weep? Not me.
Unsurprisingly, the supermarket business doesn’t quite see it this way. As far as it is concerned, it has never stopped striving to improve the quality and value of its products. “Supermarkets are constantly looking at their ranges, both in terms of the quality and the price that they can offer it at to customers,” Andrew Opie of the British Retail Consortium told me. “It’s what they do and it’s what they do well. So all of the supermarkets will be undergoing reviews of their ranges on a regular basis to examine what’s the best-quality products they can get on the shelves at the right price. This is nothing new to the supermarkets.”
Let’s be clear. A 25% meat pie is still not a fabulous item. Nor would Blumenthal and I have swooned over a 54% pork sausage. Likewise, we can lecture those in dire straits on the need to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables – where the value ranges happen to score well – though patronising people who are struggling to make ends meet has always left me with a nasty taste in the mouth. The fact is that the items I have looked at are invariably going to be a part of the diet, and that leads to simple questions of respect; of the supermarkets, which do so well out of us in good times, not forcing the very poorest to eat dross when the bad times come.
Not that concepts like this are entirely alien to Britain’s big companies. It’s called corporate social responsibility and every serious public company, including the supermarkets, has a department entirely dedicated to it. They know their business and environmental practices have to comply with certain standards. They know that their dominance of the market means they are scrutinised in detail. And they also aren’t averse to taking a hit on their bottom line. They already sell certain cheap products at below cost as loss leaders. Isn’t it time that they extended that principle so that the quality of their very cheapest food, sold to the most vulnerable of their customers, should also become a part of their corporate social responsibility code, too?
One thing that would likely help a great deal would be if the food industry would stop dumping a ton of refined sugar into everything. I wonder what people think is causing the diabetes and candidiasis epidemics that are burning through the middle-aged adult population in the USA?
And recent studies indicate that prolonged sugar abuse can do permanent damage on the cellular level.
surprisingly, the comments thread below the Guardian article Kevin links to is actually quite good. some people are clueless, but not everyone. is it just me, or are the Anglophone countires more brainwashed about food than others?
here is a question:
is food a hassle (like having to periodically fill up the car with petrol) or one of life’s great pleasures?
Good thing I moved to South America.
Maybe pole shift will involve the south being wealthier than the north, and by wealthier, I mean livable.
The poor people I’ve known eat jelly rolls washed down with a two-liter of Pepsi for breakfast. Everything else is fried. Those are the ones who don’t have a couple of beers for breakfast.
People like this have multiple health problems–diabetes, hernias, back problems, mental and emotional problems, etc.–and they have these problems at an early age. Their kids have these and other health problems.
The answer, to me, is obvious: Just don’t eat ANY packaged or processed foods. No frozen dinners, pizzas, or meat pies, no hamburger helper or boxed macaroni and cheese, no convenience foods of any kind.
You can enjoy a far better diet far more cheaply simply by cooking from scratch. You can enjoy a pretty darn good diet if you largely forego the meat and cook from scratch with whole grains and legumes. It’s so much cheaper to cook with staple whole grain foods bought in bulk that you can probably afford to go organic for most items. You can even afford to consume a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables and use a lot of olive oil.
Since I’m a poor person myself, I speak from experience.
Taking this a step further, if you plant a large vegetable garden and can your produce, you can eat real, organic produce, packed with the micronutrients you won’t get even from purchased organic products–and you can do it cheaply.
Poor people are eating foods that are full of harmful substances and lacking in nutrients for two main reasons: They’ve been taught to choose badly, and they lack access to even a small plot of land to grow their own food.
How to counteract this? Probably with grassroots community organization. Members of the garden club in my area have expressed an interest in branching out into community service, such as providing home-canning demonstrations in local churches (which all have kitchens), and helping younger people learn to cook.
We have a whole generation (or two) of young people who don’t know what kale, leeks, and rutabagas ARE, let alone how to cook with them.
It’s as fast and convenient to cook many healtful foods from scratch as it is to prepare “conveniece foods.” A few examples would be soups, couscous, fried rice, stir-frys, and bruschetta.
There is simply no reason to eat nutrient-depleted processed foods for conveniece.
Given a bit of ground, there’s no reason not to grow your own. One of my pet projects is to establish a community seed bank and encourage people to donate their surplus “volunteer” seedlings (such as strawberries, raspberries, and reseeding herbs) to the community center. I’d also like to see more people donate surplus garden produce.
This is only going to happen through grassroots organization, and from community members setting an example.
By the way, even the higher priced processed foods at the grocery store are pure crap. I recently bought a package of a premium brand of cookies (I got the craves). After years of eating homemade cookies, I was appalled at the chamical flavor and weird texture of even the premium store-bought. The same is true of most other convenience items I’ve purchased in moments of weakness. They are HORRIBLE! Once you get used to real food, there’s no going back. You just have to get people there.
Thanks for your excellent comment, Sharon.
I’ve been asked to review an upcoming book:
http://anationoffarmers.com/
They seem to have encapsulated what many of us on here know and practice already, at least on an individual level. Maybe it will be useful to your group.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to checking it out.
FYI, the Ted Kaczynski link goes to a blank page.
The poor people I’ve known eat jelly rolls washed down with a two-liter of Pepsi for breakfast. Everything else is fried. Those are the ones who don’t have a couple of beers for breakfast.
I live in a very working-class neighborhood, and even if you entirely put aside how people eat, there’s still the issue of how so very many people here absolutely saturate themselves with both cigarette-smoking and alcohol-consumption. Either of those are bad enough, but together? There are more young men in their 30’s around here who look like they are in their 50’s than you can shake a stick at! And the only reason they do this, of course, is that they are trying to medicate away the existential pain of a life of existential ignorance and doing slave-labor for peanuts in a very socially-atomized society.
@sharon:
A cookbook that taught people how to eat the better way you describe would certainly be a good and useful thing, especially the part about giving people ideas for sustenance which is easy to prepare. The reason so many working people pollute themselves with convenience food is that their lives are so full of work, work, work, working their asses off for peanuts that they feel they lack the time, energy, and consequently the motivation for real-food cooking.
Loveandlight–The first (or maybe second) impulse of any group of gardeners seems to be to put together a cookbook.
Gardeners tend to be “do-gooders.” One of the earliest items of business at our new garden club was, “How can we serve the community?” One of the earliest suggestions was a cookbook.
I like the cookbook idea–especially if free copies could be made available at the community center, which is where people come to pick up their commodities.
Offhand, without looking into alternate methods of producing such a book, it seems to me that production costs would be pretty high. Organizations used to do cookbooks as fundraisers, but I don’t know how they ever came out on it.
Maybe members of some organizations would like to take copies of favorite cheap recipes to the community center? Got a recipe for peanut-butter soup? Make ten copies and put them on the bulletin board.
Most poor people are uncomfortable in church kitchens–or in churches.
One approach would be to put on a cheap food “feed” down at the nearest trailer park–or any neighborhood. Kind of a block party with an emphasis on getting out recipes for cheap, easy, and healthful food. Lots of possibilities here, but quite an organizational challenge.
You could also put on a block party just for getting gardens going. (This would be a very ambitious undertaking, but a garden club will also attract consummate organizers.) Have people volunteer to haul in a truckloads of manure, cardboard, newpapers, and bags of leaves and grass clippings. Fall would be best for this. Have residents help each other plunk down a bunch of “lasagne beds” that could decompose over winter. Helping with the work would earn you the right to 50 square feet of garden space at your own residence.
This type of project should also involve a “feed.” Residents could provide covered dishes for everyone to share.
Any existing organization could do this with very little cost.
Ran Prieur has some solid insight on this topic posted up on his website:
Easily the biggest surprise on my tour is how few of the people I stay with are buying organic food. Mostly they eat a combination of the cheapest stuff they can buy, and what they grow themselves or get through the underground economy. So I’m wondering, if my readers aren’t buying organic, who the hell is? Probably people with a lot of extra money, some of whom are motivated more by cultural fashion than health. And as the economic collapse continues, those people are likely to shift toward cheap processed foods to continue to afford fuel and housing.
It’s important to remember that processed foods shouldn’t be cheaper — they should be more expensive, because processing costs more than not processing. A can of soda has vastly more embodied energy than an apple. Rich people used to eat fluffy white bread while poor people ate whole grain sourdough. But unhealthful food is allied to monolithic centrally controlled food producers, who have the political power to influence government to give them giant subsidies. Obama’s appointment of Tom Vilsack shows the continuing power of big agribusiness.
Buying organic can be problematic. For me, it means a trip “up to the city.” Our rural grocery stores sell only a small selection of very overpriced organic produce and a few organic staples.
So the folks buying organic will be mostly urbanites–and probably rather affluent urbanites, at that. The nearest health food store to me carries predominantly packaged “convenience food”-type health foods.
It’s also my understanding that organic certification has been “gamed” quite a bit. I understand that this means no pesticides or herbicides, but that fertilization of crops need not be along the lines of what is traditionally defined as “organic.” What this means is that the micronutrients you were perhaps expecting from “certified organic” are probably absent.
Probably the only way to get proper nutrition is to either grow your own or buy from trusted local sources.
It’s also my understanding that the micronutrients that are not provided by chemical fertilization and depleted soils are absolutely critical to good health. It’s my belief that most Americans suffer from pretty severe micronutrient starvation, which is much of the reason for the weird mental and physical pathologies you see.
It’s rather disturbing that we seem to be headed into times that will make great demands on our physical and mental powers–with a seriously debilitated population.
I guess I’m belaboring this thread–which probably no one is reading at this point.
BUT–there’s a bit of encouraging news re the garden club project!
Our group stopped meeting over the winter–people are too busy, and too tired.
Since it’s almost time to start up meetings again, I contacted our members about the next scheduled meeting.
One member excitedly told me she is planning to start a “garden-sharing” program for apartment dwellers who have no ground available for gardening. Her proposed program got a write-up in our local newspaper and begins meetings next week.
She asked me if I’d be willing to share my garden. Of course, the answer was “yes”–and I’ll be attending her first meeting.
“Garden sharing” is also an opportunity for experienced gardeners to share their knowledge, as well as their garden space.
This is an example of the way exciting possibilities can spin off from starting a simple organic gardening club. This is actually what I hoped would happen. I’m kind of a slack-twisted type, and I hoped others would kind of take the ball and run with it–starting offshoot specialty groups of their own for promoting alternative energy, wild foods, farmers markets, winemaking, cheese-making, community service projects, and things like the culture of orchards and vinyards.
One thing that’s surprised me is, the garden club core membership, though very small, is largely made up of the community’s go-getters–types whose resumes (if they had one) would reflect a long history of organizing and working on community service projects, and volunteering. They know people. They can get both your project and theirs written up in the newspaper, and they are probably well able to round up support, in the form of volunteer workers.
What this shows, I think, is that even someone like myself–without community connections, free time, organizing skills, or money–can plant a seed.
P.S.: One new member is planning to start a local farmers market. Much needed–but a major project.