With thanks to Corporate Watch for informative materials.

During the last three decades, the United Kingdom has been transformed from what Napoleon described as a 'nation of shop-keepers', with innumerable small businesses, to a supermarket culture dominated by a handful of large retailers. Their formula for success is simple - they operate efficiently, they provide a one-stop shop and they enjoy consumer confidence. Today they wield immense influence over the way we grow, buy and eat our food. They are shaping our landscape, our health and the way we interact socially, and these changes are going unchallenged because of our fast food lifestyles; consumers want quick access to a wide choice of goods at low prices. But, such 'choice' has come at a price…

Supermarkets and Industrial farming damage you life and your health

The Conservative Government tightened up planning restrictions on out-of-town supermarkets in 1993 and 1996 as it became clear that they were damaging to the countryside, town centres and local economies, as well as increasing traffic. This was supported by New Labour who promised to rejuvenate city centres and tightened up planning restrictions including a moratorium on the sale of school playing fields for out-of-town supermarket developments. As a result, supermarkets have recolonised the high street with a whole new breed of convenience stores, many open 24 hours, such as Tesco Metro and Sainsbury Local, as well as petrol forecourt stores. Stores such as Tesco Express and Sainsbury Central are aimed at passers-by and harried commuters looking predominantly for packaged ready-meals.

Manipulating Brussels regulations in order to Corner the Markets

Health and safety regulations have called cheeses made in the farmhouse kitchen and sold directly to the consumer a 'health risk', and two week old processed yoghurt in a supermarket chiller cabinet, 'safe'. In Britain, less than 1% of food poisonings are caused by dairy products, yet some of the most stringent regulations relate to it. The EU suggests keeping cheeses at temperatures that will not endanger human health. Whilst Scotland keeps to that wording, in England this is interpreted as being kept below 8 degrees C. This requires installing costly refrigerators. Such laws have destroyed small artisan cheese makers.
Live cheeses need natural temperatures! Otherwise they are rendered dead cheeses and go off very quickly.
Evidence tells us that the recent increase in food poisonings and animal diseases are the consequence of the industrial farming and processing system, not the practices of small farmers.
In particular, one could note the health risks of contracting human variant CJD from Mechanically Recovered Meat (MRM), the meat slurry made from spraying meat off the bone with a high pressure hose, that goes into cheap burgers. Did you know that you were feeding your kids MEAT SLURRY?

Producers are merely assembly-line workers producing standardised products, designed by technicians.

"Since December our prices have fallen by up to 10p per pound at a time when they should normally be going up. The industry could end up dumping thousands of tonnes of the best UK apple crop we have seen for many years. The main reason for this problem is a lack of shelf space allocated to us by our supermarkets. Cheap imports from overseas have not helped the situation.
" If the major supermarkets continue to force prices down in this way, the UK won't have a top fruit industry in ten years time, and all our orchards will be grubbed up"
Martin Harrell, an apple grower from Gloucestershire

What about those fresh hand picked strawberries? Better wash them thoroughly!!!

A Panorama documentary screened in June 2000 exposed just how vulnerable migrant workers are to exploitation by 'gangmasters'. Gangmasters, who act as an informal employment agency, hire casual labour to work on industrial farms, in packhouses and canning factories to produce much of the food that ends up on supermarket shelves. The film illustrates how migrant workers from Eastern Europe are housed in damp totally unhygienic accommodation, moved around so they cannot make friends or learn English and are unable to return home as they are indebted to the gangmasters who pay them next to nothing. As many have come to the UK illegally and speak poor English, they have no means of redress and end up trapped in a cycle of work and low pay at the hands of the gangmasters.

If they don’t provide them with decent human habitation…do they actually provide them with decent loos, showers or other washing facilities…or even toilet paper? The mind boggles!

Packet fruit denies our children the taste of real and natural products. Only the wealthy can afford top quality traditionally grown fruit daily and that type of fruit is never packaged. What we put in our children’s lunchbox is nothing like the traditional varieties that we had prior to 1963.
Farmers are losing out to big industrial growers of industrialized foodstuffs.

Even though the global food sector continues to expand, now standing at one and a half trillion US dollars a year, farmers are getting a tiny share. Fifty years ago, farmers in Europe and North America received between 45-60% per cent of the money that consumers spent on food. Today, that proportion has dropped dramatically to just 7% in the UK and 3.5% in the USA, but remains at 18% in France. In 1939, Britain had half a million farms, most less than 100 acres and worked by around 15% of the population. Britain today has lost over a third of its farms and the agricultural workforce is in serious decline. Less than 2% of the UK workforce is currently engaged in farming,

The Cheap Food Myth

Cheap food is a myth. The consumer pays three times: once in the shop, twice through direct subsidies to farmers, and finally indirectly in taxes cleaning up the mess left by industrial agriculture and subsidising transport infrastructure.
It has, for example, cost the government over a billion pounds to install the equipment necessary to remove nitrates and pesticides from our water.
The consumer also pays the price in ill health and increased risk of disease. The drive for cheap food has been behind every major food catastrophe of the past decade. Feeding ground-up animals to cattle - who are natural herbivores - as a cheap source of protein is generally recognised as the initial cause of BSE. Salmonella is endemic in chickens and their eggs because the broiler system delivers cheaper poultry products. E. coli is a by-product of intensive livestock practices. Infectious Salmon Anaemia virus (ISA) in salmon is caused by the broiler system being applied to fish.
The costs of BSE and Foot and Mouth disease could well average £4 billion each and then there are the costs of our unhealthy diets on the National Health Service.
Further liberalisation of markets through the Agreement on Agriculture, part of the World Trade Organisation, will mean that our cheap food will continue to be subsidised by environmental and social destruction as well as animal exploitation in poorer countries and the UK. Opening up markets to 'developing countries' will not benefit poor plantation workers, rather the multinational corporations who own the infrastructure by which food is transported around the world, such as international grain traders, Cargill and ADM who control 80% of the world's grain trade.
The costs of BSE and Foot and Mouth disease could well average £4 billion each and then there are the costs of our unhealthy diets on the National Health Service
The current pattern of supermarket consolidation will not help matters. At a recent seminar help by the Grocer, ex-CEO of Somerfield, David Simon, claimed that the proposed takeover of Safeway will be a 'killing ground' for weak brand and private-label suppliers, and hence the farmers who supply them. They will face crippling reductions in margins and the possibility of losing their entire business.

High quality meat???

To make a profit, the supermarkets and processors prefer to deal in bulk with a standardised product.
Some 750 million battery chickens are produced for consumption each year in the United Kingdom. Intensively raised chickens grow so quickly that they cannot support their own weight. According to the Agriculture and Food Research Council, more than half have developed serious bone defects by the age of six weeks.
Animals are packed in as tightly as possible, gorged on high-protein feed (such as bonemeal) and dosed with hormones and antibiotics before being shipped to equally huge slaughterhouses where speed and quantity count for more than sanitation.
In his shocking best-seller, 'Fast Food Nation', Eric Schlosser reveals how difficult it is to make sure that meat destined for consumption as fast food (whether sold through restaurants or for home cooking) is not contaminated in the slaughterhouse. Cattle hides are pulled off by machine, and if the machine has not been cleaned properly, dirt and manure can fall into the meat - and end up in your lunch.
This is happening in the UK…and we are importing chickens from the Far East grown in far worse conditions!

Furthermore, the closure of small abattoirs as a result of the UK government's over-stringent interpretation of international health and safety regulations has encouraged long journeys for live animals. Journeys of 200-400 miles to slaughter are not unusual for animals today; the average journey from farm to abattoir has been estimated at 100 miles. Supermarkets regularly make a premium selling 'Scotch beef' and 'Welsh lamb' despite the fact that they may have only been transported across the country and pastured in Scotland or Wales for just two weeks. Lying can double your profits!

Thirty years ago, there were slaughterhouses in most small country towns and even some villages. Since joining the EU in 1973, however, more than 70% of licensed red meat abattoirs have been closed due to the overzealous British interpretation of EU regulations. The result, of course, has been higher costs to the farmer and more stress on animals being transported to the few remaining slaughterhouses.

Collecting animals from different farms and forcing them into lorries with strange unknown beasts
causes more stress to an animal than slaughter itself does.

Dangerous chemical usage in food and farming

Some pesticides used in the UK today are, in excessive doses, highly carcinogenic, hormone disrupting and cause damage to the nervous system.
Lindane is the last organo-chlorine to be used widely in Europe, although its licence was revoked in December 2001. It is, however, used extensively in the global South, especially on cocoa. The European diet may well exceed the recommended FAO/WHO dosage by twelve times.

Glyphosate/Glufosinate Ammonium are broad spectrum herbicides used widely, and also on GM crops. Glyphosate is widely considered to be safer than other pesticides on the market, but there is evidence of toxic effects on humans, environmental toxicity and resistance in some target weed species. It is therefore untrue that it is totally safe and environmentally friendly, as some agrochemical companies have claimed.

Studies show that glufosinate ammonium causes adverse health effects in animals. It is also likely to leach into drinking water sources, could increase nitrate leaching, and is toxic to beneficial soil micro-organisms. It is currently banned on winter-sown crops in the UK due to the danger of run-off into water courses.

Equally worrying are hormone-disrupting chemicals which bio-accumulate within the body. One commonly used in food packaging to line food cans and lids is bisphenol A.

Social Structure Damage

Supermarkets have become all powerful by putting smaller retailers out of business.

I have personally been victim of this procedure and know how vehemently supermarkets encourage reports from managers about any local competition, no matter how small. They have used varying methods to remove those competitors, not least local council environmental health harassment while they themselves get away with gross misdemeanours because they have their own in house ‘environmental health control’ Anyone who has tried to complain about something seriously amiss and been told to take it to the supermarket concerned will know what I am talking about. Mild cases get a bit of compensation and possibly an apology. Really serious cases often get ‘lost’ A small retailer committing a mild offence will get slaughtered by the local EHO and possibly go to prison!

In their Ghost Town Britain reports (2003), the New Economics Foundation (NEF) revealed that between 1995 and 2000 we lost roughly one fifth of our local shops and services over the five years to 2002, around 50 specialist stores closed every week. In 1960, small independent retailers had a 60% share of the food retail market. By 2000, their share was reduced to 6% while the multiples share increased to 88%.
With our high streets disappearing and our town centres shrinking, we are losing a focal point for community life and a place for meaningful interaction between people of different classes, cultures, ages and lifestyles. According to Caroline Lucas MEP, half the nation now shops in 1000 giant superstores.
Most obviously independent food stores close because the 'under-one-roof' format of the superstore seems to offer more choice and makes shopping 'more convenient', as does free car-parking or free buses. Many have also mimicked the idea of independent deli-style food counters with ‘expert’ salespeople (I have yet to find an expert on one of these!!). This, however, can no way replicate the sense of community created by the high street, nor the level, range and quality of employment. Supermarkets have a totally different atmosphere to your local store. People push their trolleys up the endless anonymous aisles in a trance, and then queue impatiently at the checkout: its hardly a conducive environment to make a meaningful connection with your neighbours or the harried checkout operator.

One-third of the 25 million tonnes of waste produced in Britain in 1997 was packaging
The average household spends £470 per year on packaging - almost a sixth of food expenditure Disposable packaging is subsidised: the collection, landfill and pollution costs are borne by the taxpayer. Supermarkets have persistently lobbied against returnable packaging as too labour intensive, refusing to stock it.

Ever Wondered Why it Rots and Moulds the moment you get it Home ?

Your dinner spends most of it’s life in the lorry park on the motorway…waiting for a call!

All food sold in supermarkets is transported, by suppliers or supermarket trucks, to regional distribution centres (RDCs) around the country before being distributed back to supermarkets. Sainsbury, for example, has only 12 depots for chilled goods. Supermarkets work on the principle of 'Just In Time' delivery with products rushed to superstores as and when they are needed.
As storage is expensive, the supermarkets persuade farms and manufacturers to store produce on their behalf leading to refrigerated juggernauts visiting farms daily collecting just a few pallets of produce. These trucks thus become 'warehouses on wheels'. Supermarkets claim that a more centralised system means more efficient transportation, with fewer lorries delivering to supermarkets. However, this does not acknowledge that lorries carrying produce from farms must travel further to the RDCs. Supermarkets are also increasingly telling farmers to deliver the goods themselves to the RDCs. Passing yet another cost onto the suppliers. According to the 'Eating Oil' report, the food system accounts for up to 40% of all UK road freight.
Like many retailers and processors, all the major corporate agri-businesses and supermarkets continue to use refrigeration machinery and coolant materials, which use massive volumes of CFC and now HFC chemicals. These are both potent ozone depletors. Refrigeration systems also use vast amounts of electricity and therefore contribute to the burning of fossil fuels and global warming.
As well as being environmentally unsustainable, our reliance on fossil fuels make the UK vulnerable to food and fuel crises.

That fresh baked loaf of bread you opened this morning that now has green spots probably just spent a week on the M.1 in a mobile fridge!

Undue influence on government

The food industry is not short of friends in high places to make sure that its voice is heard more clearly than those of the people it has put out of business.

Sir Terry Leahy, CEO of Tesco, sits on four government task forces, and Lord Sainsbury, although officially no longer part of Sainsbury Plc, is now Minister for Science and Innovation and a major donor to the Labour Party.

Corporate interests are well represented on the Policy Commission for Food and Farming set up by the Government to decide the future of farming in Britain. These include Iain Ferguson of Tate & Lyle Plc (formerly of Unilever Plc) and Sir Peter Davies of Sainsbury's.

Archie Norman, former chief executive of Asda, is currently Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells. He was a key advisor to William Hague and a member of the shadow cabinet, where he was dubbed the 'Green-belt destroyer'.

The outspoken Lord Haskins is probably the most influential food industrialist. Former chairman of supermarket own-brand suppliers, Northern Foods and Express Dairies, the UK's largest processed food and liquid milk processors, he also has the ear of Tony Blair on farming matters. He sits on various government task-forces and is rural recovery co-ordinator for areas affected by Foot and Mouth disease.

Tesco and Asda both sponsored fringe meetings at the Labour Party Conference in 2003.

The manipulation of health and safety requirements

One way in which small food producers have been systematically put out of business is through excessive hygiene regulation only satisfied through costly machinery or processes. These regulations were initially drawn up in 1995 by the WTO, although were designed to assure that food production conforms to the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Limit (HACCP), a standard originally designed by Pillsbury, a multinational food company that markets Haagen Daz and Burger King[34]. This was at the request of NASA who wanted to assure the purity of food available to its astronauts. It is also the standard used by Codex Alimentarius, the corporate-dominated UN body that regulates food standards.

Thirty years ago, there were slaughterhouses in most small country towns and even some villages[35]. Since joining the EU in 1973, however, more than 70% of licensed red meat abattoirs have been closed due to the overzealous UK interpretation of EU regulations. Under the 1992 EU Directive, ‘taps must not be hand operable’. This was translated in UK regulation as ‘any taps shall not be operable by hand or arm’ (adding £300 per unit). ‘Fittings shall not be made of wood’ became ‘no wood is allowed anywhere within the slaughter hall or any workroom’ etc. The net result has been the need for cattle to be transported long distances, in crammed unhygienic conditions and considerable stress, to the few remaining abattoirs. Thus reducing the quality of meat and the increasing the costs incurred on the farmer.

It has also made small farmers' lives difficult. It is simply not possible to conform with many of the health and safety regulations if you want to sell a few dozen litres of milk and eggs to your neighbours. In the UK, less than 1% of food poisonings are caused by dairy products, yet some of the most stringent regulations relate to it; regulations which have destroyed, for example, small artisan cheese makers[36]. These laws make cakes from the farmhouse kitchen sold directly to the consumer a health risk, whilst two week old processed yoghurt in a supermarket chiller cabinet, safe.

Recent epidemics in food poisonings and outbreaks like BSE are a consequence not of small producers but of the industrial farming and processing system. This is a system where animals are merely commodities: pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones, unloved, and kept in cramped conditions where disease can spread fast. The risk of contracting human variant CJD from Mechanically Recovered Meat (MRM), the meat slurry that goes into cheap burgers made from spraying meat off the bone with a high pressure hose, should have been forseen, and likewise with the unlabelled bi-products of the beef industry, such as vitamin pills encased in gelatine or bovine serum derived from British cows, which was used in the polio vaccine during the height of the BSE crisis, as well as in other common vaccines, until 1993

These things WERE known as early as 1987 from my own personal experience and probably long before that. I was often informed of practices and opinions by a supplier at Pershore Wholesale Market in Birmingham from 1987-1994 For instance the following was reported to me at the time we were no longer allowed to buy the freshly cut sections of beef off the hung carcass but had to buy blood soaked cryovac packs of the cuts we required. These had been killed using the methods described below * and believe me it was the death knell of decent British Beef.
What consumers did not know was that they were being fobbed of with old cow meat that had been tenderized with these chemical solutions during slaughter. Meat that only pie makers and cheap mass producers would buy otherwise. We were paying the same price as for prime meat! The cryovac packs were no more for hygiene than they were for disguising the crap we were forced to buy.
Most Midland restaurants had the choice of this rubbish or the time consuming search for a decent farm outlet still slaughtering its own beef. However the government soon put a stop to that. Not too long before the BSE crisis developed. Funny that this was a dairy cow disease and they were now forcing us to eat the damn things!

This is what they injected into cows to turn them into ‘Tender Beef’ the substance starts to partially digest the muscle prior to slaughter…the animal must have its heart beating while the stuff gets around its body…they don’t tell you that bit but hey. Are we stupid or what?

*The postexsanguination vascular infusion process was developed by MPSC, Inc. (St. Paul, MN) to reduce meat variability and to improve meat quality. The process involves stunning and exsanguination by severing the jugular veins, and then infusing substrates through the left carotid artery. Little research has been published on this process. Farouk et al. (1992b) found that vascular infusion with a solution composed of 0.23% dextrose, 0.21% glycerin, 0.14% phosphates, and 0.10% maltose improved tenderness of longissimus dorsi steaks from culled dairy cows. Furthermore, Farouk et al. (1992a) found that vascular infusion of lambs with the same solution at 10% of live weight decreased longissimus dorsi Warner-Bratzler shear force (WBSF) values.

Calcium is involved in postmortem acceleration of myofibrillar tenderization of meat through activation of the calpain enzyme system (Koohmaraie, 1996). Calcium chloride has been studied extensively as a way to manipulate the calpain enzyme system to accelerate postmortem tenderization (Koohmaraie et al., 1989; Koohmaraie and Shackelford, 1991; Polidori et al., 2000). Infusion interarterially at 10% of lamb live weight with 0.30 M CaCl2 dramatically increased tissue calcium in infused carcasses and decreased WBSF values (Koohmaraie et al., 1990). On the other hand, Farouk et al. (1992a) demonstrated that prerigor infusion of lamb carcasses with 0.15 M CaCl2 decreased tenderness 35%. No research has been conducted on the effects of vascular infusion of CaCl2 in young, grain-finished beef cattle, and minimal research has been conducted with a solution of saccharides, sodium chloride, and phosphates on carcass traits and meat palatability. Therefore, the objectives of our study were to evaluate the effects of two vascular infusion treatments on carcass traits and meat palatability of young, grain-fed beef cattle.

And here is a description of the taste tests!

The descriptive flavor profile panel evaluated the warmed-over longissimus lumborum muscle from CaCl2 carcasses as having less beef flavor identification, less brown roasted flavor, and more soapy/chemical flavor than warmed-over longissimus lumborum and semitendinosus muscles from MPSC-infused and CON carcasses and the semitendinosus from CaCl2-infused carcasses (all P < 0.05). The CON semitendinosus muscle had more soapy/chemical flavor than the CON longissimus lumborum muscle. There were a few differences (P < 0.05) among the treatment combinations for the traits of metallic, soapy/chemical, and cardboard, but they were inconsistent. Both the warmed-over longissimus lumborum and semitendinosus muscles had cardboard off-flavors, in contrast to the freshly cooked muscles. Within muscle, there were virtually no differences in flavor-profile characteristics between the MPSC-infused and CON carcasses. These results agree with those of Yancey et al. (2002), who found that infusion with a MPSC solution similar to the one used in this study resulted in only small, inconsistent effects on flavor-profile characteristics of longissimus lumborum and semitendinosus steaks.

In contrast to the results for steaks, ground beef patties from CaCl2-infused carcasses that were freshly cooked and evaluated by the descriptive flavor profile panel were evaluated as having more (P < 0.05) beef flavor identification, more brown roasted flavor, and less soapy/chemical flavor than patties from MPSC-infused carcasses (Table 9 ). Patties from CON carcasses had a more (P < 0.05) brown-roasted and a less soapy/chemical flavor than those from MPSC-infused carcasses. The warmed-over patties from CaCl2-infused carcasses had less beef flavor identification, more soapy/chemical, and more oxidized/painty flavor than patties from MPSC-infused carcasses. Furthermore, warmed-over patties from MPSC-infused carcasses had less soapy/chemical flavor than patties from CON carcasses, which contradicts the results for freshly cooked ground beef. Yancey et al. (2002) reported some statistical differences between warmed-over ground beef from MPSC-infused and CON carcasses, but the results were inconsistent.

Do the words SOYLENT GREEN ring in anyone’s ears?

About Us | Site Map | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | ©1998-2006 Personal Chef UK.Ltd