Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (19 page)

Shopping for food is when most of us become aware of the industrial supply chain for the first time – the moment it impacts directly on our lives. With their miles of stocked-up shelving and serried ranks of tills,
supermarkets are the means by which the global food superhighway enters our cities and is transferred down to our individual scale – a daily feat equivalent to converting a raging torrent into millions of glasses of water. As far as supermarkets are concerned, this last stage of food delivery is the trickiest one of all – the operation they are least well suited to. The human scale is not what supermarkets have ever been about; nor are the idiosyncratic layouts of traditional city centres. Both mess up the economies of scale on which their profits rely.

Supermarkets aren’t really compatible with cities; at least not with the dense, higgledy-piggledy sort you get in the Old World. The first ones in the USA barely ventured into cities at all: they just sat on the outskirts of towns and waited for customers to drive to them. Eighty years on, out-of-town retailing remains the ideal for supermarkets, because it allows them to stick to what they do best – source food cheaply and move it around in bulk – and leaves customers to do the rest. Given that the public role of historic city centres was chiefly the buying and selling of food, supermarkets are at odds not just with local high streets, but with the very concept of what a city is.

I still remember my first encounter with the problem. It was on a day trip with some friends to Somerset in the early 1980s, and we had stopped in a small market town to get a newspaper, some coffee and some aspirin. It was a lovely Saturday morning and the town had a beautiful high street, but there were very few people about, which I remember seemed a little odd at the time. After wandering up and down the street for a few minutes, we were unable to find a café, chemist, or newsagent, although had we wanted to buy property in the area we could have chosen from any one of at least six estate agents. Perplexed and starting to get just a little grumpy, we finally asked a passer-by for some help. He looked at us as if we were a bit slow, and pointed down the road, where a few hundred yards out of town (how could we have missed it?) was the sprawling red-tiled roof of a Tesco superstore. It was one of the new breed of ‘village centre’ types – all fake-vernacular detailing with a cartoon clock tower – and none of us had ever seen such a thing before. Within a few minutes, we had our aspirin and newspaper, but the cup of coffee still eluded us. Although the store had a café, it was so full of what seemed like the entire
population of the town stuffing itself with burgers and chips at 11 a.m. that we decided we couldn’t face the queue.

Nobody would make the same mistake today. In the intervening 25 years, supermarkets have transformed the British urban landscape. Although the first out-of-town superstore was built as early as 1970 (guess which: a Tesco), the great era of superstore expansion in Britain took place in the 1980s and 90s, during two decades of rampant development that, unlike anywhere else in Europe, went virtually unchecked by planning constraints. By the time the Tory government woke up to the damage out-of-town stores were causing, it was too late. By the mid 90s there were more than 1,000 in Britain, and the lingering death of the British high street had already begun. A study carried out by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) in 1998 found that a new superstore built on the edge of a town could reduce market share for city-centre food shops by as much as 75 per cent.
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A subsequent report by the New Economics Foundation (nef) entitled
Ghost Town Britain
showed how even a small reduction in business in the high street was enough to start killing shops off, eventually reaching a ‘tipping point’ when the old town centre was no longer viable: ‘Once the downtown starts to shut down, people who preferred to shop there have no choice but to switch to the supermarket. What begins as a seemingly harmless ripple becomes a powerful and destructive wave.’
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A decade after the superstore tsunami devastated British town centres, the supermarkets realised that the resultant void represented a new business opportunity. Once again, Tesco led the way, opening its first ‘Metro’ stores in 1998 – corporate replicas of the local shops it had just helped to destroy. At first Tesco moved cautiously, not sure how well the new ‘convenience’ format would perform, but it need not have worried. It was soon clear there was an enormous untapped demand for inner-city food shops, and the battle was then on to claim as many prime high-street sites as possible before their rivals. In 2002, Tesco bought T&S, an existing convenience chain with 450 stores, converting them at the rate of four to five a week. Although the land grab raised some City eyebrows (one analyst reckoned it would have taken Tesco 15 years to expand its business that quickly without the
takeover), it was approved by the Competition Commission on the basis that convenience food shopping is a different market to that of ‘one-stop’ shopping at supermarkets.
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The logic was absurd, but it has stuck. For many independent food retailers, this ‘second wave’ of supermarket expansion was even more devastating than the first, since it meant that for the first time, they were competing directly for the same business. By 2006, supermarkets had gained a 12 per cent share of the convenience sector and the figure was rising fast.
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My local food shop duly got Tesco’d in 2005. It was a sad day for me. Although no gastronomic Aladdin’s cave, the old shop had a certain quirky charm to it, and stocked a great range of pickles. Living in central London, I do not have to shop at Tesco if I don’t want to – it just means walking a bit further. But not everyone in Britain is that lucky. Residents of Bicester in Oxfordshire, for instance, a town of just 32,000, had no fewer than six Tesco stores by 2005, and very little else. One resident interviewed by the BBC was so desperate for a change that she was prepared to drive ‘as a special treat’ to Sainsbury’s in Banbury, a round trip of some 40 miles.
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Supermarkets are now so much part of our everyday lives that it can be hard to remember what cities were like before they came along. To anyone born after 1980, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers must seem about as remote as the days before mobile phones and computers (which, come to think of it, seem pretty remote even to me). Yet just a generation ago, high streets were the social hubs of urban neighbourhoods, and shopping for food was a time to swap news and gossip. Supermarkets today are impersonal filling stations: pit stops designed to service the flow of life. They support individual lifestyles, not sociability; a characteristic they share with iPods and computers. The internet may be a great communicative tool, but it can’t replace the connection we feel when we meet people in the flesh. That is where food is so powerful. It brings us together in physical space, forging bonds other media can’t reach.

In her seminal 1960s study
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
, Jane Jacobs described the ‘ballet of Hudson Street’: daily life in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood where she lived in New York. With its mixture of houses, shops and small businesses, the street was animated at various times by people going about their daily routines: the cafés were crowded at midday with factory workers eating lunch; the shops were busy in the mornings and evenings when the locals did their shopping. Jacobs argued that the myriad of personal exchanges that took place every day in the street created a strong sense of local identity; a sense of communal ownership that encouraged people to look after the street, and by extension, one another. She recalled one incident, when she witnessed a pavement struggle between a man and a little girl:

As I watched from our second-floor window, making up my mind how to intervene if it seemed advisable, I saw it was not going to be necessary. From the butcher’s shop beneath the tenement had emerged the woman who, with her husband, runs the shop; she was standing within earshot of the man, her arms folded and a look of determination on her face. Joe Cornacchia, who with his sons-in law keeps the delicatessen, emerged about the same moment and stood solidly on the other side … that man did not know it, but he was surrounded.
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The struggle turned out to be a false alarm (the man was the girl’s father), but the point was that on Hudson Street, anything out of the ordinary was immediately noticed; potential crimes were a matter of communal concern. Local shopkeepers acted like neighbourhood policemen: they knew everyone, and made it their business to know what was going on. As the title of her book suggests, Jacobs was a passionate critic of the monolithic, monocultural, ‘zoned’ approach to city-building that was then taking over in America. Her book was a paean to traditional mixed neighbourhoods, and their capacity to foster a sense of belonging.

Jacobs didn’t emphasise the role of food in forging social bonds, but without it, her beloved Hudson Street would have been a far emptier
place. She took food’s role in urban life as a given – something too obvious to mention. Yet 40 years later, that role is not only under threat in America and Britain, but routinely undervalued or ignored. Unlike, say, the demolition of a beloved landmark, food’s disappearance from cities often leaves the urban fabric virtually untouched – as it did in the neighbourhood of my childhood. Growing up in central London in the 1960s, we had a small row of shops – a butcher, fishmonger, baker and greengrocer – at the end of our street. Every day, my mother took me and my brother there to do our daily shop. The shopkeepers knew us very well, and would offer us kids toys and sweets. Sometimes my mother would send us back to fetch something she had forgotten – her trust in her local shopkeepers was as implicit as their trust in her to pay them the following day. Today, that row of food shops is a series of antiques showrooms of the kind that displays just one item of furniture in the window, and it would be unthinkable for a six-year-old to be sent out shopping alone. To look at a map of that part of London now, you would hardly notice the difference – the buildings all look the same – yet the experience of living there has changed fundamentally. Forty years ago, it was the centre of a busy urban village. Now it has about as much life to it as an empty motorway.

Street life isn’t the only casualty of food’s disappearance from cities. Another seemingly trivial loss, but one that contributes a great deal to a city’s character, is smell. Our sense of smell is our most underrated faculty – something we have learnt to disdain. Yet nothing links us more powerfully to our emotions and memories. London was once a city of smells, and I can map my life there through them. Every morning on my way to school in Hammersmith, I had to run the gauntlet of the Lyons factory on Brook Green, with its heavenly aroma of chocolate sponge – something to which I was (indeed still am) very partial. Although the factory condemned me to arrive at school most days hopelessly salivating, it was an exquisite pain I bore quite happily. Other memorable odours included the stink of hops in Chiswick and Fulham from the breweries along the river, and the fishy whiff of Billingsgate, which lingered long after the market closed in 1982. Around that time I was living above a bean-sprout factory in Wapping, where the Chinese workers slept in hammocks over the
bean-sprout tanks. The stench every week when the tanks were cleaned out was indescribable (actually, it was perfectly describable, but you probably don’t want to know what it smelt like).
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In any case, the air outside our front door was pungent enough to stop us from hanging about. I must have had a knack for smells, because my next move was to Bermondsey, close to the Sarson’s Vinegar factory on Tanner Road (which, as the name suggests, had once smelled even worse). When the wind blew in the right direction, you didn’t need to put vinegar on your chips; the air did it for you. Somehow the ubiquitous tang was rather comforting. You could always find your way home in the dark.

Most of London’s homely (and less homely) smells are now gone; expelled to factory complexes well outside the city. London is off the olfactory map – and a good thing too, you might think. Who wants to open their front door to the stench of rotten bean sprouts? The thing is, so many other things have disappeared along with those smells. Without anything to compare them with, it can be hard to realise quite how dead British cities have become – until you go abroad, that is. On a recent trip to India, it took me days to get used to the teeming life in the streets: to the cows and elephants, the goats and chickens, the beggars and sellers, the hooting, shouting and bellowing. To my health-and-safety-conscious eyes, everything seemed like an accident waiting to happen, catching my attention like pencils rolling off a desk: tottering lorries piled high with sugar cane, a pregnant woman crossing a six-lane highway between slamming buses and lorries, a cyclist wobbling in the wrong direction through the same metallic onslaught. Underpinning all this frenetic activity there was food: people cooking on pavements, smearing sweetmeats on the walls of holy shrines, buying snacks from carts and stands, carrying baskets of vegetables on their heads. Everywhere there were smells, too: delicious spicy ones, mingled with petrol, mud and excrement. India assaults your senses, but you soon get used to it. After India, it is Europe that is the real shock. The streets seem positively deserted; the cars and buses impossibly large and shiny; the spaces between buildings huge and empty. Everywhere you look, there seems to be an absence of something: of people, animals, vegetables, smell, noise, ritual, necessity, death. The juxtapositions of
human life have been designed out of our cities, leaving us to live in an empty shell.