-
Posts
-
I just found myself ranting on another (slightly) related post, so thought I’d start a new topic.
It all started off because Gordon Ramsey wants the government to fine restaurants for using imported/out of season food.
However, it struck me that it’s actually the supermarkets who are the ones to blame here.
They are the ones who mass import huge quantities of fruit and veg and as a result, it’s the supermarkets who are responsible for making available the food that we eat.
Given that we either live or die by what goes in our mouth, surely there has to be a level of responsibility from the supermarkets to ensure that what they sell us is as nutritionally perfect as possible.
To illustrate the point – according to DEFRA – the average potato is sprayed with various chemicals 23 times from being sown to harvested!
Similarly, most tomatoes are not grown in soil, but rather a chemically balanced liquid.
The reason for this is supposedly the consumer demand for any product at any time of year – as a result, the farmers who are in effect beholden to the supermarkets for their income, have to find ways of increasing productivity to ensure bumper crops.
Supermarkets say it’s consumer demand – but how many people have actually gone to the manager of their local Tesco/Asda/etc in the middle of winter and said “excuse me, but can you order some yellow cherry tomatoes for next week”
And what about asparagus – it has a 6 week natural “life” in the UK, but you can buy it anytime of year – mainly imported from Peru.
And kiwis -did you know that a kiwi uses more than it’s own weight in fuel to actually get here?
But let’s not forget the taste – this summer, I challenge you to grow a tomato plant in soil and then do a blind taste test with a supermarket one.
At the end of the day, it’s the supermarkets with their huge purchasing power who are responsible for the tasteless, chemical covered foodstuffs that most of the population eat and if anyone should be fined for using imported products, it’s them.
Agree with you totally and then realise I am sitting here munching away on a bowl of pistachio nuts. :oops:
We are the problem, the consumer, if we didnt buy them the supermarkets would soon stop importing them :roll:
Without wanting to repeat myself from a previous thread ‘We want it all, we want it all, we want it all, and we want it NOW! :roll:
I don’t get all this fuss about the supermarkets at all. They provide a huge range of good foodstuffs and they do it cheap. Isn’t that what we want as customers?
Oh, silly me! Of course not, we all want to go and buy expensive manky food in brown paper bags from a farmers’ market – much better!!!
you can get some quite good products if you know the right market… I hate pistachios as I am allergic to them, of course I didn’t find this out till after I had eaten half a bowl full, let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. Also there is nothing wrong with supporting local farmers, they have been getting screwed over by the super markets for years
Also there is nothing wrong with supporting local farmers, they have been getting screwed over by the super markets for years
But this is rough justice for all those years of subsidies, concessions and EU handouts that farmers took with one hand while condemning the EU with the other. Where has all the money gone that farmers got paid for set-aside – money paid for doing nothing?
Who cares, just pig out were lucky we got any food !
Setaside was done away with this year in light of recent food shortages and price hikes. I do agree with previous posts, we do import far too much food than we really should, although the problem is that people today now expect to be able to go shopping and buy Strawberries, lamb and other products, all year round, when previously you could only get them in season.
I have found the produce at farmers markets to be good value, but they are not a regular feature in every town or city, you just cannot rely on them for your weekly shop.
And on a slightly differen slant, the vast amount of subsidy money paid to farmers over the years directly went into agricultural production, hence making the price of goods cheaper on the shelf, cheaper in some cases than the cost of production- you have been paying the real cost of food for years, only you didn’t know it.
The ultimate beneficiaries were of course supermarkets, who made a massive margin on products they bought at very low (unsustainably low) cost and flogged to you for a much greater amount. Supermarkets are not cheap, this is a lie promoted in very expensive marketing campaigns designed to trick you- even the prices between two different stores are very different- they do massive amounts of research about an area before they build a store, they know how much people earn, how much they are likely to spend, what competition is in the area, and thus set their prices accordingly. In the town where I live, there is no other supermarket for about 15 miles, their prices are understandably extortionate.
And finally, the householder today spends less on food in real terms, than he/she did in 1890, despite a 6 fold increase in the calorific content in their diet. How else is this possible? For the first time in history, the rich stay thin and the poor get fat. You can literally afford to eat yourself to death today.
Get involved in this discussion! Log in or register now to have your say!