Jay Rayner: why Londoners should give thanks for supermarkets

There are easier ways to make friends in London right now than by bigging up supermarkets. You could start a benevolence fund for traffic wardens, say, or drive around the suburbs in the early hours with the windows rolled down, playing dubstep at maximum volume. At a time when it seems the boroughs’ planning officers are running an equal opportunities policy — they don’t appear to care who takes over vacant retail units, as long as it’s Tesco or Sainsbury’s — extolling the virtues of inner-city branches of supermarkets is like trying to sell North Korea as a tourist destination.

My own neighbourhood, Brixton, is a case in point. Barely a week goes by without a new campaign being launched to fight attempts by one of the big players to turn an old pub into a new outlet. Generally, councils fold. Planning law is on the supermarkets’ side and if the councils resist, they risk being faced with punishing legal costs. And so, only a couple of weeks ago, Tesco was given the go-ahead to turn the George IV pub, a hulking old boozer on Brixton Hill, into yet another Express. There will very soon be five Tesco Express or Sainsbury’s Local branches in the couple of miles between Brixton Tube station and the South Circular junction. They’re as rapacious as bindweed, only less pretty to look at.

Even so, I still think it’s possible to say nice things about supermarkets in London. Or at the very least, amid the public relations car crash they’ve become, it is still possible to find positive things to say about the idea of them. For example, the anti-lobby will often tell you that all supermarkets are nasty, anonymous barns, staffed by dead-eyed automatons, whereas independent local shops are all run by warm, lovely people who have only your best interests at heart. Anybody who has lived and shopped in London for even just a few months will know this is cobblers; that local shops are merely run by people, some of whom — like all people — are lovely and warm and caring. Some, however, appear to have learned their customer relations skills at the same school where the CIA teaches waterboarding.

By way of an example I tell a story about my dad, Des, on Berwick Street Market in Soho in the 1960s. It’s one of those yarns about the city that all London families have. My dad wanted some apples and stopped at a stall with an especially fetching display. He asked for a few; the stallholder immediately turned around and began taking some from a box underneath. My dad remonstrated; the stallholder told him he’d have what he was given. So Des walked off, telling him to keep his bloody apples. ‘And you keep your bloody money,’ the stallholder shouted after him, ‘you black-bearded, bollock-faced bastard.’ For ever more, in my family, my dad was a black-bearded, bollock-faced bastard. And the notion of the universally friendly local market stallholder was revealed for what it was: a myth.

Here’s a story from the other side. When my eldest son Eddie was two years old, he went with my wife, who had taken a career break to care for him, on the weekly shop at Tesco (so shoot me). One week she was busy, so I took him to the big shop on Acre Lane, where the staff knew his name. All of them had something to say to him, and to many of their other customers, too. This should not be surprising. Of course, some supermarkets may be anonymous barns, but many of them are staffed by people from their local community, and they know their customers.

But there are other, cruder reasons to give thanks for supermarkets. Firstly, there are the economies of scale. In 1900 we spent 50 per cent of our expendable income on food; by 1970 that had dropped to 20 per cent; today it is ten per cent, and that is all down to the mass buying power of supermarkets. And thank goodness for it, because the cost of living in cities has exploded. During the past 50 years, average salaries have increased by a factor of just over 30, while house prices have leaped by a factor of 90. That means we have to spend more time making sure we earn enough to support ourselves; that both adults in a two-parent household have to work, leaving less time to shop. Suddenly the supermarket isn’t just a convenience, it’s a necessity.

Likewise, few of us recall just how much time doing the shopping took before the arrival of supermarkets. I am just old enough to remember as a small child being taken on the family food-gathering expedition to J Sainsbury’s — when it was still a multi-countered grocer’s rather than a self-service supermarket — in Kenton, north-west London. It was my job to say ‘six wings and six legs’ to the butcher, so he could fill our weekly chicken order. It was cute. It was adorable. It was one of the ways in which my mother made the whole damn experience in some way bearable. Our bread came from the baker on the corner by our house, our fruit and veg from Robert the Greengrocers across the road, and any tinned goods from a small shop called Walton, Hassle and Port ten minutes’ walk away. It sounds lovely, doesn’t it, this patronage of local and small businesses, this tight web of interdependent relationships? And we did like the people involved. But gathering everything that the family might need for the week was a tiresome job. My mother had better things to do.

And then, of course, there’s the impact of supermarkets on the vibrant food culture that we in the city hold so dear. We are blasé about being able to get hold of stuff such as miso paste, flat-leaf parsley, Thai fish sauce, fennel seeds, smoked garlic, sun-blushed tomatoes and the rest, without seeking out hidden-away ‘speciality’ stores. Supermarkets did that for us. Interestingly, many of the celebrity chefs who bang on about supporting local shops sell huge volumes of their cookbooks through supermarkets.

So they have made the lives of Londoners better. The fact is, though, that while it’s entirely possible (if risky) to acknowledge all this, we also need to recognise the damage the supermarket sector is currently doing. Indeed, it now risks imperilling Londoners’ supply of food. While cheaper food is a good thing, arguably it’s become too cheap. In the early 1990s, Britain was more than 70 per cent self-sufficient in food. Today we have dropped to below 60 per cent self-sufficient, and many in the agriculture world believe it is now just 50 per cent. Why? Because supermarkets have forced such vicious deals on food producers that there hasn’t been enough money for them to invest in the agricultural base. Many farmers, especially those in dairy and pork, have simply given up.

Why does this matter? After all, for decades supermarkets have been able to import what they need from around the world. Not any more. There’s been a huge explosion in the size of the middle classes in countries such as China, India, Brazil and Indonesia. They are now scoffing all the food that British super-markets thought was theirs by right. Unless we start producing more, British consumers risk seeing large price rises as we’re forced to compete in volatile international markets that are affected by extreme weather events caused by climate change. If we don’t start paying a bit more for our food now, we risk having to pay vastly more later.