As the supermarket doors glide open there they are – cosmetically perfect, irresistibly firm, brilliantly coloured fruit and vegetables. And yet, when you get them home, they taste of nothing. Is it the way you cooked them, or have you just selected badly? No, you’ve been conned.
Lying on tilted beds of glistening ice, fish from around the world gaze unblinkingly at bored supermarket shoppers. Red snappers, ‘air freighted for freshness’ from the Indian Ocean; Chilean seabass ‘previously frozen’ from the Southern Atlantic; Farmed salmon from the Isles of Scotland; exotic, seemingly abundant fresh fish.
Monsanto’s global website says: ‘Imagine innovative agriculture that creates "incredible" things today.’ Actually, I think most of us are more interested in ‘credible’ things when it comes to agriculture. Like food that people can trust is safe. And crops that meet the needs of the farmers that grow them. The Monsanto slogan used to be ‘food, health, hope’. As if this wasn’t absurd enough, it has now been changed to ‘Imagine™’. John Lennon must be turning in his grave.
Supermarkets are keen to portray themselves as loyal and supportive business partners, nurturing suppliers in their quest for the best deal for consumers.
Joanna Blythman describes how she infiltrated the employee-conditioning process of Asda, subjecting herself to its brain-melting mix of Maoist self-criticism and revivalist-style fervour
We were being given 20 to 21 pence a kilo, they were selling them in the stores at twice that, and we needed 32 pence to break even. The prices would change by the day, and then they’d take 60 to 90 days to pay you.
For 40 years Percy Schmeiser grew oilseed rape on his farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Usually, he would sow each year’s crop with seeds saved from the previous harvest. In 1998 Monsanto took Schmeiser to court.
In February a report by George W Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) suggested that fast food workers might in the future be classified as manufacturing workers. A CEA report asked: ‘When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a “service”, or is it combining inputs to “manufacture’ a product?’
Action and Information on Sugars (AIS) was created by public health dentists and dietitians in the mid-1980s to dispel the myths about sugars and health propagated by the sweet foods industries. One of our greatest successes was a campaign to stop GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) claiming that its Ribena ToothKind drink ‘did not encourage tooth decay’. The claim was endorsed by the British Dental Association (BDA).
‘Refined'. Of a higher quality. The result of conscious improvement. Not so with sugar. Refined sugar has been depleted of its vitamins and minerals. What is left consists of pure, refined carbohydrates.
