The Future Of Supermarkets

Not to put too fine a point – if Big Food has their way we’ll all be eating out every day all day. They don’t care who they sell to, as long as the produce keeps moving and the profits keep flowing in. In fact, if fewer people shopped for their ingredients and instead, more ate at fast food, diners, cafes, and restaurants, their job would be simplified because they wouldn’t need to maintain large supermarkets.

Instead they’d just have distribution centres where the demand for lines would be predictable and instead of selling foodstuffs to 12,000 individuals they’d sell that same amount to maybe 30 – 100 restaurants. The 100 – 200 or so staff working in local supermarkets would no longer be required, replaced by a dozen distribution centre staff.

Many people nowadays would actually prefer not to have to cook. And when you look at it from the historical perspective, we’ve gone round this cycle multiple times. Almost every culture had market stalls with ready-to-eat foods – and did a great business. The working poor had a small cooking facility (probably barely enough to make breakfasts and hot drinks) and had their “house bread” cooked in a community oven. They probably ate most of their meals from the “take-away market” stalls.

It had advantages – mainly to the wealthy employers and business people – but undeniably, they worked. Employees at the various ventures (farms, goldsmithies, construction projects, etc) weren’t wasting their energies and several hours in cooking meals.

The wealthy employed house and kitchen staff, and had whatever meals their hearts desired. The produce stream always included excellent produce for the wealthy tables, and the mediocre to the downright abominable went to the market food stalls. Market stall owners formed the middle layer. They didn’t directly work for the wealthy, and in order to make a dinar, they had to turn pretty ordinary produce to a profit.

Less input food was wasted than if 5,000 peasants had each cooked their own meals, because most of them would not voluntarily have eaten the trash that the market stall owner wouldn’t trim off, for the profit. Do YOU slice and dice the whole broccoli plant, or does a significant portion of the stringy stem go into the compost or the bin?

A System Of Rorts

Let’s go elsewhere – China and Japan. But we’ll get back to that broccoli again, too.

Rubbish Bin Oil

Both China and Japan have a tradition of eating out or ordering take-away. It’s very logical, the more you eat out, the less you need a full-on kitchen with whitegoods and a roomful of cooking utensils and appliances wasting your living space. In Japan especially, with living space at a premium, that makes sense.

And because Japanese have been getting along like this for a long time, there’s also a culture of doing right by the diners. In China, which experienced a major famine not so long ago, and has many many MANY more poor and working poor people, that system is open to exploitation. I’ve in the past covered forty-year old meat circulating in China’s food industry, farmers desperate to increase their income by selling more kilograms of produce and actually exploding fields of watermelons due to using so much growth enhancer, growing garlic and onions in human sewage because of not being able to afford fertiliser.

There are people in China that follow the harvesters around the fields and grab anything that falls to the ground after the machine has gone by. And there’s reclaimed food oil. People skim the floating oil off food waste bins behind food vendors, out of the sewers in those places, and then roughly filter it, boil it, and bottle it for resale. As cooking oil again…

The food vendors there also have flexible ethics.

Back To Broccoli

The farmer should by rights trim the broccoli to only the wholesome portion and feed the poultry with the trimmings. But it’s also 5-15% of the sale weight of broccoli. What to do, what to do? Of course they sell it stem and all, and the price of the wholesome good part has an automatic 10% surcharge, unless you do use it all.

When it gets to the wealthy person’s house, the cook is instructed to cut it off and feed it to the Master’s poultry, or they are given it as a perk. When the market food stall proprietor gets a whole head of broccoli, they’ll tend to cook every bit of it too. To use less would be to make a 5% hole in their profit.

(By the way, my recipe section is available here under the category “TEdAMENU Tuckertime” – and like the frugal Master’s cooks and market stall owners, I have recipes to use the stems in recipes. Feel free to look here under the TEdAMENU Tuckertime category or on the original home of TEdAMENU for my recipes.)

The trouble with the “more eating out, fewer home kitchens” approach here is that we have a Chinese food system rather than a Japanese one…

The Two Systems

Individual kitchens are indeed a complete waste of money and energy and resources. But stack up making spaghetti bol at home for a fo4 at around $14 vs going out and feeding them that same dish at around $35 – $55 depending where you go.

For instance, the kitchen can consume 20% – 30% of the cost involved in building a home. Whitegoods, counters, wash facilities, on top of that being an entire room that gets used for an hour or two a day.

More in some households, far less in others – but what we now consider a requisite for a home, was once a thing only the wealthy could afford to own and operate – and we don’t have the income to support the staff that a kitchen really requires.

We eat healthily – but produce prodigious amounts of food waste because we buy peasant produce and try to fashion it into wealthy meals.

The only problem for us is that Japan/China dichotomy – if we abandoned our home kitchens en masse, we’d be exploited en masse too. There needs to be a whole paradigm change before it would become a system that’s fair for all. But if we wanted to save the 30% -40% of food waste we’d have to start in on that right now.

And as long as capitalism remains in operation, our food will always be used as a system of control and coercion, the keep us powerless and compliant.

Never forget that, and Keep The Bastards Honest!