Supermarket wars

There was an amusing example of bien pensant thinking at its most removed from reality in the Sunday Times last weekend in India Knight's column attacking supermarkets (which are in the news at the moment because of the Competition Commission's recent call for curbs to be placed on them). Knight had little time for the argument that, for the majority, supermarkets are a) convenient and b) more affordable than the alternatives. "I find the poverty-grotesquely bad diet thing completely wrong-headed," she wrote. "Rubbish highly processed food is not cheap, whereas you can make enough rice and dhal for six people for about £1.50." Indeed, India, I'm sure you can. Helpfully, Knight opposed the argument that shopping locally is inconvenient for "lower socioeconomic groups" by citing the past—"I don't expect that their grandparents bulk-bought Sunny D." Indeed, India, I'm sure they didn't. (And your point, exactly...?)

A more sensible view was provided, perhaps unexpectedly, in the Observer by Jay Rayner (the paper's restaurant critic), who defended supermarkets on the grounds that they are "bloody convenient." He is right: I am a keen cook, I instinctively prefer small shops, and I don't have a family to shop for, but even so, at least some of the time I find it more convenient to go to the (excellent) Waitrose down the road, or the even closer Tesco Metro, than to traipse around the (widely spaced and not all terribly good) small shops that my area of north London boasts. And I bet India Knight, despite her protestations, does at least some of her shopping at supermarkets too.

There is an annoying tendency among the middle-classes to complain about the fact that Britain is not, in essence, more like small town France or Italy. It isn't—and nor is it ever going to be. Get over it. But let's be cheerful about the fact that, in food terms, things are vastly better than they were ten or twenty years ago—and yes, in part, supermarkets are partly responsible for this.