Last month I went to an Edinburgh Tesco for tomatoes—several different ones, because a tomato sauce gets better the more varieties you put in it. There were cherry tomatoes and plum tomatoes; on the vine and off it; over-ripe and under-ripe; organic tomatoes, Jersey Jewel tomatoes, beef tomatoes like little pumpkins and basic Dutch tomatoes, plump and uniform, at £1.28 a kilo or about 10p each. (That day in Tattie Shaw's, one of the city's few remaining greengrocers, there were just two types, the cheaper at £1.52 a kilo.)
Has hunter-gathering mankind ever known such abundance? Did I kneel briefly at the checkout to express thanks to Sir Terry Leahy and his underpaid hordes for this bounty? No: at home I quickly stripped the tomatoes of their packaging—if any guests turned up early I didn't want them catching sight of the Tesco logo, not so much for the shame as for the debate that would inevitably follow. In middle-class Edinburgh, one shops at the cash'n'carry for the staples and for groceries at a number of small, expensive specialist shops.
We love to hate Tesco, a devil that operates in many guises: a community-destroying, environment-trashing, carbon-belching, competition-crushing, high street-homogenising, developing world farmer-exploiting behemoth soon to swallow us all. For many, the ultimate insult is the money Tesco generates: £2.2bn in profit in the year to February, while Sir Terry will earn nearly £4m himself. Thus Tesco has become a multipurpose scapegoat and Tescophobia unites the nation, from trade unions to David Cameron.
Over the last few months Sir Terry has been trying to address the grumpy middle classes. In a short speech of his to the Work Foundation, the words "community" or "neighbourhood" appeared a dozen times. He announced ten changes. These included moving some distribution from road to rail (and buying two "green trains" from Canada to do it), £100m for investment in environmentally sustainable technology, a plan to halve energy use in Tesco buildings by 2010, initiatives on child nutrition, health and sports promotion, more consultation with communities over new stores and more local sourcing of foods.
The only detail on Sir Terry's list that the media picked up was the introduction of biodegradable carrier bags— welcome in our house because we can now bury these shaming items in the garden instead of hiding them behind the fridge. But does Sir Terry really think these efforts might get customers to like Tesco more? The websites that exist to bait and criticise Tesco didn't register the speech. Perhaps Tesco cannot win the arguments: with 31 per cent of British food sales it is an offensively tall poppy in an arena where efficiency, value and range of choice don't score highly with consumers. Tesco's liberal critics are not to be placated because so many of their complaints are inherently contradictory. Those who want fresh green beans in midwinter also want Tesco to pay a better wage to the east African farmers who produce them, while objecting to Tesco flying the vegetables here on carbon-emitting jets.
Of course, most of us still shop there. So far. But Tesco's competitors are sticking knives into these soft spots in the giant's underbelly. Waitrose pushes hard at the caring middle-class shopper—trumpeting its organic and fair trade lines, and its projects for the education of citrus farmers in South Africa. There's market share in the moral high ground, and the Waitrose Foundation spent £330,000 on the citrus farmers in 2005. That's peanuts, of course, compared to the sums Sir Terry is promising to spend on Tesco's community initiatives. And Tesco has undoubtedly sold more organic and Fairtrade produce than all its competitors put together. Yet Waitrose is now hailed as the "most organic supermarket" and its figures, with profits up 19 per cent, are the most impressive in the sector. Waitrose is about to open its first shops in Scotland—in Edinburgh's Morningside and Comely Bank. Edinburgh's bourgeoisie, whose sensitivities are famously fine-tuned, are delighted—and Waitrose does cheap tomatoes too.
The world's worst recipe
Fourth Estate has just published Bad Food Britain, Joanna Blythman's pleasurably splenetic tirade against the food industry, the foodies and the supine Britons who watch celebrity chefs on television while chewing on a ready meal (we eat more of them than anyone else in Europe, she says). Blythman also states that 40 per cent of the food sold in this country doesn't get eaten—which made me wonder about the waste in the food book trade: how many of the 4.2m cookery books reportedly sold in Britain last year were actually used? Of course, all too often the recipes don't work: the tears, the broken crockery and ruined dinner parties that result from these failures are—along with obesity and blowtorch burns—part of the dark side of our new food culture. It's time for the amateur chef to fight back against the millionaire recipe-jockeys: in that spirit I'm launching a hunt for the world's worst recipe. We'll begin with Delia Smith's ajo blanco (chilled almond soup), from The Delia Collection. "Supremely wonderful," trills Delia. "Supremely vile," responds one excellent cook I know who's tried to make it twice. "Garlicky water with a sludge of almond powder. It isn't edible but it might well make a decent face cream." Any more nominations?
