You just can’t go to a dinner party these days without someone whingeing about
the provenance of the blinking mange tout. In our new era of melting
glaciers, drowning polar bears and monsoons in Yorkshire, it just won’t do
to have your veg flown in from Kenya. Organic and free range is no longer
good enough. You need to be buying local.
The bestselling American novelist Barbara Kingsolver has just spent a year as
a “locavore”, relying almost entirely on her garden cum smallholding in
Virginia for produce. Sadly, I’m not a bestselling novelist and I live in
Sevenoaks where only the stockbrokers have room to rear pigs. But Kent, as
everyone knows, is the garden of England. Surely it’s possible to survive
here without flown-in pineapples?
Family Rudd decided to give it a go: we would spend one month boycotting
supermarkets entirely, preceding it with one month using them with abandon
as a benchmark. Would life fed locally be a breeze? Or would the
inconvenience and extra expense of a supermarket-free existence be
unbearable?
We began the supermarket month at 9am on a Saturday in Tesco. I’m normally a
Waitrose man so this came as something of a shock. So many people. Such
bright colours. We were here to buy a week’s shopping but, look darling, if
we buy two pizzas we get another one free. And the cheese is on two for one.
And the wine’s half price. And so’s the malt loaf. But you hate malt loaf.
No I don’t. Yes you do.
It was like that for 87 minutes: trolley wars, smart marketing, and
once-in-a-lifetime special offers. I spent £88 and felt like I’d been
molested by the end of it. I’m not the only one: in a recent survey in The
Grocer magazine more than 50% of Tesco shoppers said they felt bored,
stressed, frustrated or overwhelmed by the experience.
And this was only week one. We would conclude two months later that it is
possible to live without supermarkets, to source lovely local produce and
even spend considerably less in the process. But it wasn’t going to be easy.
Not at first.
Because – in my town at least – the rise of the supermarket has already put
many local shops out of business. We’ve got not one but two Tescos (the
largest of which is currently appealing a ruling to prevent its expansion by
50%) a Sainsbury’s, an M&S, a Waitrose, 327 mobile phone shops and
4.7 billion estate agents. The last independent newsagent on the high street
shut last week, there’s no grocer, both fishmongers are no more and the
baker we once used baked his last loaf long ago.
This is of course typical in market towns up and down the country. In 2004
2,157 independent local convenience shops closed across Britain. Specialist
shops close every day while Tesco now controls 30% of the grocery market,
making £2.5 billion profit.
Does this matter? Isn’t life just cheaper and more convenient if the
supermarkets take it over? Before we started our little experiment my heart
said no, but my head said yes. On the one hand all those “buy one get one
free” deals and ample parking are just so tempting. On the other you have a
sneaking suspicion that a £3.19 chicken (two for £5) with ammoniated elbow
burns is not a good thing, even if it does come with a picture of a grinning
farmer on the front.
IN supermarket week one we spent £127.08: one main shop, a supplementary one
at Sainsbury’s Local and my Waitrose lunchtime sandwiches. In that first big
shop, we cast aside any concerns over food miles and bought sugar snaps from
Kenya, four organic apples from America and half-price plums from Chile.
It was a week of exotic excess and processed food galore, of monkfish and
pineapples, pizzas and pies, microwave meals and bagged-up salads. And
inevitably we threw quarter of it out, partly because none of the vegetables
tasted of much, partly because I really don’t like malt loaf and partly
because our trolley was bigger than our stomach.
For the rest of the month, we progressed in poshness through Sainsbury’s
(posher because of Jamie Oliver?) to Waitrose and M&S. The Waitrose week
was a good one: the main shop was a wallet-bashing £123.99 and we dropped
another £30 before we made it to the weekend.
But we feasted on Prince Charles’s gooseberry possets, Dr Karg’s organic crisp
breads, coffee that saved the world and moz-zarella hand-rolled on a Cuban
lady’s thigh. The bag of watercress was “from more than one country”.
Something’s gone wrong if your watercress is multi-national.
By the end of the month we’d spent £542.11 on groceries. Our fridge had
buckled under the weight of the globally acquired produce and my
14-month-old son had become another statistic for the childhood obesity
doom-sayers. Well not quite, but it felt that way once we’d embarked on our
month of relative frugality.
The rules we set, which reflect a growing trend among locavores, were a) no
supermarkets; b) no chain food shops – which knocked out 7-Eleven; and c) to
buy local wherever possible. Not just as in local shop but locally produced.
In the first two days, we were on the verge of calling in United Nations food
parcels. We have no decent bakery within a mile, the butcher was closed on
Monday, we had no veg and I couldn’t find a pastrami bagel. But, like all
good humans, we adapted to survive. On day three we ordered a vegetable box
that turned up two days later.
Vegetable box schemes are like Marmite – you either love them or hate them. My
mum hates them because she likes to plan her meals. We love them: it’s a
good way of staying in touch with the seasons. British people just aren’t
supposed to eat lettuce in the winter.
Our Riverford box was bursting with spring freshness: all the staples, some
(quite chewy) spring greens, a delicious globe artichoke. The carrots had
soil on them. Actual soil. From the ground. And some of them were odd
shapes. One looked like Norman Tebbit. You don’t get that at Tesco. And you
don’t get the taste either. Our medium box cost £12 and got us from Thursday
to the following Tuesday in a delirium of earthy happiness.
On the first weekend, I managed to get to the butcher before it closed at
midday. It was barbecue weather. In about three minutes I’d parted with a
surprising £32.50, but if it hadn’t rained it would have been the best
barbecue ever. Angus fillet hung for a month, homemade burgers, proper
organic chicken from a local farm.
For the rest of the week, a newly enthused wife cooked evening meals from
scratch. At work I went to the deli rather than Waitrose and averaged £5
rather than £3 on my lunch. Total spend for seven days: £92. Less than the
Tesco week. Hoo-rah, but through lack of planning we had been almost
entirely vegetarian. The amount of time cycling from the butcher to the
health food shop to the candlestick maker to the woman outside a village
three miles away rumoured to be selling tomatoes was significant but
stress-free.
Or it would have been if the rest of the town’s population didn’t rely on a
constant fleet of anticyclist 4x4s to do their gas-guzzling,
planet-de-stroying, carbon-spewing shopping. See how quickly you become a
local food fascist?
On the second Saturday, we were still terribly excited and none of us had been
run over. Then it got better. Acting on a tip-off, we found a farmers’
market in a village 10 miles from Sevenoaks. Wow. Asparagus. Wow. Kentish
eggs, bread and Kentish goat’s cheese. Wild sea bass caught near Rye (no
wonder it was wild) and steak and kidneypie so good we could pretend to
dinner guests that I’d made it.
But the real triumph was the chicken, which had been brought up incredibly
well within 10 miles of our house. It had been allowed to roam free, it had
attended a good university and then it had been bought for £7.30 by me.
All the food tasted good: much better than the previous month. Our house smelt
nicer, our fridge looked less like an advert for obesity. We had less
rubbish to throw away each week. And the trip to the farmers’ market might
have cost £47.25 and took three hours longer than the trip to Sainsbury’s
one month earlier but it was a great deal more fun.
THEN WE had a blip: 18 days in, we took our eyes off the ball. We had run out
of farmers’ market produce, the vegetable box wasn’t being delivered until
tomorrow, all the local shops were shut/too far away/long-closed and the
cupboards were bare. My wife Harriet, in full Good Life mode, refused to let
me break the embargo and get a pizza. She made bread (easy; breadmaker had
been number four on our wedding list and we had some flour at the back of
the cupboard), then phoned my parents and asked them to bring some young
nettles from the allotment (“It’s an emergency”).
When they arrived, the nettles were a) not young; and b) covered in an
alarmingly spotted aphid. “Protein”, she said, enthusiasm waning a little.
While she found a nettle-soup recipe, I tried not to get stung by either the
nettles or the aphids while prepping. The soup was inedible and we went to
bed with only a ration of bread, which is exactly the sort of thing that
used to happen to my grandmother in the inter-war years.
The month ended with what can only be described as a local-food,
antisupermarket, my-God-how-parochial triumph. We were going wild camping
with four families to a field in Sussex at the weekend. I mentioned this to
my butcher (he’s mine now, he’s called Graham Batchelor and we’re almost on
first-name terms), and he suggested a half lamb spit-roasted.
I said we didn’t know how to make a spit-roast. He phoned the local Scout
leader who rented us theirs for a tenner. The lamb took 10 hours to cook,
everyone said it was the best they’d ever tasted and we even got our son
nice and high up on the Cubs’ waiting list. None of that would have happened
if we’d just been driving to the supermarket and back all month. IN 2003
Tesco applied for a 50% increase in its retail space at the Sevenoaks
Riverhead superstore. When that Tesco opened in 1998 my butcher lost £1,000
in takings in one week. We haven’t been to a supermarket since the
experiment ended: it isn’t necessary, preferable or fun. But if supermarkets
keep expanding it will be the only option.
In our nonsupermarket month, we did things people complain they can’t do any
more these days: we met local people, we escaped our car, we enjoyed a meal
that was an event rather than a means to refuel. And if this hadn’t been a
proper challenge we would never have bothered because supermarkets are, on
the face of it, just so easy.
Last week I was remonstrating with a friend who bought the potatoes he’d
served at his dinner party from Sainsbury’s. He explained he’d been away on
business, landed only that morning and didn’t have time to go trotting off
to five different shops just to keep his annoying dinner guests happy. Later
it emerged he’d been kite surfing that day, before nipping to Sainsbury’s on
the way home.
I told him he shouldn’t have gone kite surfing. Food should not be
hunter-gathered in five minutes flat. He told me to shut up. So I did.
