Why supermarkets are a feminist right

In this centenary year of female suffrage — thank you, Millicent, thank you, Emmeline — let us celebrate another great 20th-century symbol of women’s liberation. Not just the vote, the pill and the washing machine — but the supermarket, with its doors still open as the working woman leaves the office and makes her way home to an empty fridge. Aisles of milk and honey.

I used to shriek at supermarkets. Plastic! Waste! Bolivian winter strawberries! On Saturdays, I would skip to the Notting Hill Farmers’ Market to buy fruit and veg and free-range chickens with the giblets left in. Then home like a pious packhorse, with rhubarb and beetroot in Daunt Books bags.

Early this year I moved to Paris with my Foreign Office fiancé and was thrilled to be living the French cheese-shop fantasy I’d read about in MFK Fisher books and seen in Amélie. I spent the first freezing week of January, umbrella inside out, queuing at the fromagerie, boucherie, boulangerie and epicerie, at the tiny shop where a stern grandmère crimped pincushions of ravioli. A different filling each day: pumpkin and amaretti; mortadella and myrtilles.

I tried four greengrocers with Garden of Eden names — Verger Saint Paul, La Bonne Pomme, La Vie en Fruits, Le Paradis du Fruit — in search of The Diplomat’s favourite, oranges sanguines. I walked to the crémerie for butter, the pâtisserie for pudding and the poissonnerie for bottled bouillabaisse. Isn’t this romantic, I asked myself as I queued and rummaged for small change and weighed satsumas. By Friday I was sobbing for Tesco Metro, Aldi and M&S Simply Food.

What had been a pleasure on a Saturday morning in London had become une peine massif in Paris. For my dirty, inorganic secret was that the farmers’ market was heavily supplemented by Sainsbury’s Local and home delivery. Pop-up pickle stalls are fine for the weekend. Day to day? Epic time-waste. I know the French way is the way we should ideally shop. Local stores, passionate producers, seasonal fare, cooking from scratch with the best ingredients. But it all takes so long. French planning law effectively bans big supermarkets from town centres so there are few places that are reliably open every day, at all hours, selling everything one could possibly Waitrose-wish for.