Not many of you, I suspect, will have noticed the arrival in August of the £2 chicken at Asda, Britain's cheapest supermarket chain. But it produced a glimmer of light in the generally dismal history of mass-produced food. Asda's 1.55kg bird (cheaper, kilo for kilo, than the store's dog and cat food) was less a marvel of battery-chicken technology than a tactical coup in the price war that drives Britain's big retail chains: the chicken went on sale as a loss leader, a yah-boo-sucks to Asda's rivals in the battle to be seen providing "better value." Of course, anyone who has eaten basic supermarket poultry knows that such meat is all but valueless, as you'd expect from something reared from egg to killing weight in under six weeks.
Chicken, the staple of British meat eating—38 per cent of all consumption—is bred first and foremost to be cheap. Its taste and texture—and the birds' welfare—are of minimal importance, because Britons have been trained to buy flavour separately, in rather more expensive bottles and packets. Obviously enough, this works nicely for the supermarkets, but less well for the poultry farmers, who, according to Exeter University's Centre for Rural Policy Research, typically get less than 2p profit per bird. And the price of chicken in Britain has risen only by 15 per cent in the last 20 years, whereas most foodstuffs have gone up by between 100 and 200 per cent. The cheapest chicken now comes from Thailand: the only reason there's still a mass poultry industry in this country is because of some lingering value in having a "British chicken" stamp on the label.
So what could be good about the £2 chicken? For a start, the reaction of Tesco, which decided to resist Asda's challenge and instead increased the price of its equivalent chicken by 4 per cent to £3.39. Terry Leahy, Tesco's canny chief executive, announced that he believed we were seeing "a fundamental shift in the priority that consumers place on food." What he has spotted is that the extraordinary and continuing growth in organic sales—up 22 per cent in 2006—is not just about the middle classes. "The growth in the proportion of our customers buying organics is fastest among less affluent customers. This could be a big long-term positive for the industry," Leahy said.
Too right. Big box retailers in Britain are fascinated by the rise in the US of Whole Foods Market, which recently opened its first European store in London. Whole Foods, which sells itself as an environmentally sensitive purveyor of natural and organic foods, has been the fastest growing mass retail food outlet in the US for five years, with profit margins double those of ordinary supermarkets. Americans call it "Whole Paycheck," but the chain has proved that supermarkets can be luxurious and friendly, pay their staff above mimimum wage and make money. The stripped-down sparseness that screams "value" is not what all customers want.
Leahy's move reflects a lot of talk over the summer about the end of the cheap food era. The main cause for concern is this year's 50 per cent rise in cereal prices, largely pushed by the emerging biofuel industry. Organisations such as the UN World Food Programme and the OECD are ringing alarm bells. The OECD warns of a 50 per cent rise in food prices over the next decade. Timothy Lang, a gloomy but consistently accurate analyst of food policy at London's City University, said in September: "I think the era of eating cheap meat once or twice a day has to end."
But surely an increase in the cost of food is a good thing, at least for wealthier countries. According to most figures, we spend as little as 10 per cent of disposable income on food in the west nowadays, whereas it took about a third of our grandparents' household budgets. More expensive food should mean better farming, less waste and healthier diets. It may even mean we begin to value our food again, and enjoy it.
Lobsters galore
There was no shortage of Scottish lobsters this summer. My family puts down pots off the west coast of Scotland, and this year we broke all records. I heard reports from as far north as Knoydart of the extraordinary numbers arriving in the creels in late August and early September. The only explanation anyone had was the usual—global warming—until it was remembered that a decade or so ago, an EU-funded project seeded the waters off Ardnamurchan Point, where the tides of the Minches and the southern Hebridean seas meet, with lobster at the larval stage. This was much mocked at the time—but has it finally paid off?
As usual, I left the island full of fresh lobster, promising never to touch the sad animals in city fishmongers again. Over 80 per cent of lobsters sold in western Europe are now the American sub-species. Easily recognisable because of the green and orange taint to their shells (British lobsters are blue and gold, like an admiral), these are flown or shipped on ice from Maine and Canada, then thawed enough to twitch for the customers on the fishmonger's slab. They taste of almost nothing, which is why you so rarely see lobster served in restaurants as God intended it: cold, poached, with mayonnaise and a potato salad.
