Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Penguin UK (2004), 240 pages
Description
In a series of undercover investigations tracking some of the most popular foods we eat at home, Felicity Lawrence travels from farms and factories to packhouses and lorry depots across the world. She discovers why beef waste winds up in chicken, why a third of apples are thrown away, why all wines taste the same. She meets the hidden armies of migrant workers exploited throughout Britain on whom our supermarkets depend. And she shows how obesity, blighted town centres, motorways clogged with juggernauts, environmentally ravaged fields in Europe and starving smallholders in Africa are all intricately related aspects of our newly globalized, industrialized system of 21st-century food production.
User reviews
LibraryThing member reading_fox
This is the expanded and published version as what started life as a series of investigative reports for the Guardian newspaper between 2001 and 2003. Hence it's already beginning to show its age, as practises and regulations chage. Covering a range of basic foodstuffs - chicken, salad, bread,
The inital section of each chapter is really informative, providing a lot of details on some of practises that routinally go on in processing the food prior to it arriving glossy and shiney looking in the supermarket aisles. Some of the later digressions are less interesting, and can be lightly skimmed.
Perhaps the key points of the book is that there are many many ways of processing all foods, saving money for the big corporations that do so. The author sees all of these as uniformly bad, and is probably correct - but there are many sides to the complex story of food, and the book only tells one of them.
Ultimately like many of the other books discussing how our food on the table has changed relatively recently, it fails to answer to the big question it raises - what would you do instead? and how do feed a world population of 6bil using those methods, including the densely populated cities where there are no gardens, and people whose lives don't allow time for 3 hr shopping trip followed by 2hr of food preparation. Many or even most people shop at supermarkets because that's most convenient trade-off of availablity and quality they prefer - and no solutions are offered about how to change these prefereances even if such a change was desirable.
But. The case is strongly made, that supermarkets are adversely effecting customer choice, purchasing decisions made by very few people have dramatic widespread impact on what is available to buy, and the harsh conditions imposed on the vast numbers of poor producers to get that cheap food.
A thought provoking read, not as dramatic as Fast Food Nation, but of wider scope.
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apples, coffee and prawns and finally the ubiquitous ready meal - in each case it quickly descends into a digression about the power and influence supermarkets have, and why this is not a good idea. The inital section of each chapter is really informative, providing a lot of details on some of practises that routinally go on in processing the food prior to it arriving glossy and shiney looking in the supermarket aisles. Some of the later digressions are less interesting, and can be lightly skimmed.
Perhaps the key points of the book is that there are many many ways of processing all foods, saving money for the big corporations that do so. The author sees all of these as uniformly bad, and is probably correct - but there are many sides to the complex story of food, and the book only tells one of them.
Ultimately like many of the other books discussing how our food on the table has changed relatively recently, it fails to answer to the big question it raises - what would you do instead? and how do feed a world population of 6bil using those methods, including the densely populated cities where there are no gardens, and people whose lives don't allow time for 3 hr shopping trip followed by 2hr of food preparation. Many or even most people shop at supermarkets because that's most convenient trade-off of availablity and quality they prefer - and no solutions are offered about how to change these prefereances even if such a change was desirable.
But. The case is strongly made, that supermarkets are adversely effecting customer choice, purchasing decisions made by very few people have dramatic widespread impact on what is available to buy, and the harsh conditions imposed on the vast numbers of poor producers to get that cheap food.
A thought provoking read, not as dramatic as Fast Food Nation, but of wider scope.
Show Less
LibraryThing member wyvernfriend
This is a question I've often had. Why is it that there's so much of a choice in the supermarkets yet it's largely unappealing? I find myself buying some foods because of need rather than want and I could see how it would be so easy to fall into the trap of buying food that's bad for me rather than
This is a book looking at ways we've destroyed the food market and ways in which we can change this. It's an interesting book full of advice on how to change your life and find better ways of finding your food.
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"good" food because the good food is so bland sometimes.This is a book looking at ways we've destroyed the food market and ways in which we can change this. It's an interesting book full of advice on how to change your life and find better ways of finding your food.
Show Less
LibraryThing member ishtahar
This book should be compulsory reading for everyone. And if you're not moved to tears by it… well I don't know what to say. This book made me cry, rage, shake with anger. A lot of it I already knew, a lot of it I've been trying to do something about but to see it all written down in black and
• Most of you probably already know that most of the chicken in supermarkets and restaurants is broiler; overfeed, filled with hormones and antibiotics, spends its pathetic life living in its own shit with no natural light and killed in a grossly inhumane manner (and sadly the organic chooks are often killed in exactly the same place and way unless you buy them from specialist farms), and that the packaged chickens are filled with water to plump them up, but did you also know that an awful lot of supermarket and catering chicken is also bound with pig and cow DNA to make it firmer. Which is just great if you are Hindu or Muslim.
• That off-season mid-winter salad from Spain? Picked and packaged by north-African migrant workers on a pittance living in shanty towns with no running water or sanitation and all this just a mile down the road from the Costa Del Sol. And even if you couldn't care less about human rights, do you really want someone who hasn't washed for days packing your salad?
• The average trolley full of food has travelled about 100,000 miles to get to you. Marvellous. And even better some of it's flown from the UK (packaging especially) is packed up in foreign parts and flown back. Double marvellous.
• Bread - now bread is a great one. Bought bread isn't made like it should be. Oh no. It is no longer allowed to rise properly anymore. We just don't have the time for that, we need that bread on the shelves. Of course if it's not risen it will sink when it's baked. So we fill it full of hydrogenated fat to keep it solid. You know how white sliced fills your mouth like putty? Well that'll be why. I started baking my own bread when I realised the shop bought gave me belly ache. I'm not fucking surprised. Plus how can anyone possibly deal with their own weight issues when they have no idea what's in their food.
• Fruit and veg has to conform to certain sizes and shapes to be sold in the supermarket you know. The consumer, that's you and me, don't want to buy food that doesn't look like it's made of plastic. Where the hell am I when they do these surveys? About 40% of fruit and veg are wasted in this country each year because they don't conform. Even the Prince of Wales gets his Highgrove Organic stuff rejected. Best apples I've ever eaten were from my mum's tree. Looked like old ladies' faces but tasted divine. All this waste has made half the farmers give up. Can't afford it. And this puts rural landscapes, biodiversity and ecosystems under threat. 60% of ancient woodlands, 97% of meadows and 50% of birds that depend on agriculture are gone.
• Coffee (and we're talking you're jars of instant here rather than Starbucks and its ilk who at least buy fair-trade) - A Ugandan coffee farmer will sell a kilo of his coffee for 14 US cents. By the time it's on the supermarket shelf its market value is $26.40 per kilo. And that's after they've put all the crap in it that makes instant coffee. Now hippy I might be, but I'm also the daughter of an economist and do in fact believe to an extent in globalization, capitalism and free market. But this isn't a free market. This is bullying. This is like medieval feudalism. Any wonder the South American and African coffee farmers are pulling up their coffee crops to grow coca beans for cocaine and marijuana plants?
And why? Money of course. The major supermarket undercut and undercut and undercut. At one point they were selling baked beans so cheaply that even Nestle said they couldn't afford to bottle air at that price, thus closing down the Crosse and Blackwell bottling plant.
And there's absolutely nothing we can do unless every suddenly stops shopping at supermarkets, and sadly an awful lot of people either don't have a choice, or don't have the information to make a choice. For my part I'm getting pretty much everything from Abel and Cole now. Food shouldn't be cheap you know. Where we got this idea that we had a right to cheap food I don't know? Less plasma tvs and more simple living IMHO.
And if none of that has touched you, I leave you with this:-
"Some 1.2 billion people in the world still have too little to eat; the same number today suffer from being overweight…..For the first time in 100 years medical experts are predicting that life expectancy in developed countries will fall. Thanks to obesity our children face the prospect of dying younger than us."
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white in one space filled me with absolute horror. A few titbits for your delight:- • Most of you probably already know that most of the chicken in supermarkets and restaurants is broiler; overfeed, filled with hormones and antibiotics, spends its pathetic life living in its own shit with no natural light and killed in a grossly inhumane manner (and sadly the organic chooks are often killed in exactly the same place and way unless you buy them from specialist farms), and that the packaged chickens are filled with water to plump them up, but did you also know that an awful lot of supermarket and catering chicken is also bound with pig and cow DNA to make it firmer. Which is just great if you are Hindu or Muslim.
• That off-season mid-winter salad from Spain? Picked and packaged by north-African migrant workers on a pittance living in shanty towns with no running water or sanitation and all this just a mile down the road from the Costa Del Sol. And even if you couldn't care less about human rights, do you really want someone who hasn't washed for days packing your salad?
• The average trolley full of food has travelled about 100,000 miles to get to you. Marvellous. And even better some of it's flown from the UK (packaging especially) is packed up in foreign parts and flown back. Double marvellous.
• Bread - now bread is a great one. Bought bread isn't made like it should be. Oh no. It is no longer allowed to rise properly anymore. We just don't have the time for that, we need that bread on the shelves. Of course if it's not risen it will sink when it's baked. So we fill it full of hydrogenated fat to keep it solid. You know how white sliced fills your mouth like putty? Well that'll be why. I started baking my own bread when I realised the shop bought gave me belly ache. I'm not fucking surprised. Plus how can anyone possibly deal with their own weight issues when they have no idea what's in their food.
• Fruit and veg has to conform to certain sizes and shapes to be sold in the supermarket you know. The consumer, that's you and me, don't want to buy food that doesn't look like it's made of plastic. Where the hell am I when they do these surveys? About 40% of fruit and veg are wasted in this country each year because they don't conform. Even the Prince of Wales gets his Highgrove Organic stuff rejected. Best apples I've ever eaten were from my mum's tree. Looked like old ladies' faces but tasted divine. All this waste has made half the farmers give up. Can't afford it. And this puts rural landscapes, biodiversity and ecosystems under threat. 60% of ancient woodlands, 97% of meadows and 50% of birds that depend on agriculture are gone.
• Coffee (and we're talking you're jars of instant here rather than Starbucks and its ilk who at least buy fair-trade) - A Ugandan coffee farmer will sell a kilo of his coffee for 14 US cents. By the time it's on the supermarket shelf its market value is $26.40 per kilo. And that's after they've put all the crap in it that makes instant coffee. Now hippy I might be, but I'm also the daughter of an economist and do in fact believe to an extent in globalization, capitalism and free market. But this isn't a free market. This is bullying. This is like medieval feudalism. Any wonder the South American and African coffee farmers are pulling up their coffee crops to grow coca beans for cocaine and marijuana plants?
And why? Money of course. The major supermarket undercut and undercut and undercut. At one point they were selling baked beans so cheaply that even Nestle said they couldn't afford to bottle air at that price, thus closing down the Crosse and Blackwell bottling plant.
And there's absolutely nothing we can do unless every suddenly stops shopping at supermarkets, and sadly an awful lot of people either don't have a choice, or don't have the information to make a choice. For my part I'm getting pretty much everything from Abel and Cole now. Food shouldn't be cheap you know. Where we got this idea that we had a right to cheap food I don't know? Less plasma tvs and more simple living IMHO.
And if none of that has touched you, I leave you with this:-
"Some 1.2 billion people in the world still have too little to eat; the same number today suffer from being overweight…..For the first time in 100 years medical experts are predicting that life expectancy in developed countries will fall. Thanks to obesity our children face the prospect of dying younger than us."
Show Less
LibraryThing member AnnaOok
From the blurb: "In a series of undercover investigations tracking some of the most popular foods we eat at home, Felicity Lawrence travels from farms and factories to packhouses and lorry depots across the world [....]"
Fascinating and scary. A look at what corporate industry does to food.
Focused
Fascinating and scary. A look at what corporate industry does to food.
Focused
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on the UK, though a lot would apply everywhere in the West (and some things in other countries are specifically mentioned). Show Less
LibraryThing member samsheep
I was reading this knowing that she would be preaching somewhat to the converted as I am already wise to a few of the horrors of modern food production and already veggie etc. It's a little dated now but still has much interesting info, mostly on the politics of food which is just too depressing
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for words. Well researched book and well written. Show Less
LibraryThing member MarthaJeanne
One of the more positive of this sort of food crisis books. The book ends with suggestions for ways of getting better food yourself, and with a few examples of programs that get better food to people.
LibraryThing member RajivC
This book, by Felicity Lawrence, is excellent. In India, we believe that how we implement laws is horrible. We castigate ourselves for this. However, in the book, she exposes the food-processing industry in the West. After reading the book, I find it hard to look at processed foods with anything
As an Asian, I don't know the details of the companies and the cases she quotes. However, the lessons should be clear to anyone who reads the book.
This book is well written, and is worth reading.
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but a jaundiced eye. As an Asian, I don't know the details of the companies and the cases she quotes. However, the lessons should be clear to anyone who reads the book.
This book is well written, and is worth reading.
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Awards
Andre Simon Award (Winner — 2004)
Guild of Food Writers Awards (2005)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
2004-05-01
Physical description
240 p.; 7.7 inches
ISBN
0141015667 / 9780141015668