If you want good food from the supermarket without agonizing over it or spending a fortune, ignore the mind control and keep it seasonal and simple.
June, 2009
For me, being an ethical food shopper can tricky. Is it Fair Trade? Organic? Rainforest Alliance? Does it come from a country with a dubious human rights record? Has it been the subject of a recent health scare? Does it contain palm oil not sourced from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil? How many food miles does it have? Does it contain potentially harmful additives and colourings? Is it tested on animals? Is the company owned by a global conglomerate with any subsidiaries which block cheap drugs to poor countries/push inappropriate baby milk powders to people without clean water to mix them with/ invest in arms/smash unions? And on and on and on.
Then I have to try to give this bewildering number of parameters some kind of relative value.What’s better: organic beans fair traded from the indigenous people of wherever, or the ‘conventional’ ones from just round the corner? This creates such a quantum level of complexity I’m lucky if I make it to the check-out before inflation pushes my purchases out of my price range.
I’m vegetarian, which tips the ecological balance sheet slightly in my favour and reduces my confusion by cutting down on the options. Sadly, it sometimes cuts the options down to the extent that there aren’t any, and a smug glow in the belly is not very filling at supper time. I have a vegetable patch. It currently contains three gigantic silverbeet, three spring onions, some lettuce and a rose bush, which is not really enough to live on.
I buy as much stuff under the Fair Trade and various organic banners as I can, and it’s great to see that more and more of them are hitting the shelves. But since I am not an investment banker, the prime minister, or both, there’s a limit to that as well.
So, given that people like you and me still have to use supermarkets, how do we ensure we shop effectively without being a complete sell out?
Firstly, let’s arm ourselves with a little knowledge on how supermarkets work. From the moment we walk through the door, we are entering a carefully controlled environment designed exclusively to do two things – fill up our trollies and empty our bank accounts. Supermarket do this by spending truck loads of cash working out how people move through their shops, how they buy and when they buy.
It’s called Neuromarketing. The gorgeous aroma wafting from the bakery is not just a by product of bread making. It’s also there to make you hungry, so you will buy more food. The mellow in-store muzak is there to slow you down, so you will spend longer browsing the shelves. And the shelves are not stocked for your convenience, they are stocked to maximise income.
For example, the first thing you always come to in the supermarket is the fresh fruit and vegetables, which makes very little sense for shoppers. They can be easily damaged, so you spend the whole time digging them out from under your tins and bottles. But research suggests the experience of selecting good wholesome fresh food at the outset of a shopping spree makes people feel less guilty about stocking up on rubbish later on.
More expensive items, or items the store particularly wants to sell, will tend to be to the right at eye level or just above it, because this is where most people look first. Sumptuously branded product lines from the best known producers will hog the carefully designed, expensive and power-hungry limelight, while cheaper home brands will be languishing somewhere near your ankles.
This is partly because many producers actually pay for prime positioning. For the same reasons products intended for children will sport the colours of a nuclear explosion and just happen to be within reach of your offspring, or at their eye level.
Some items, even whole sections, are moved from one position to another in the store so that you keep moving, collecting other items as you search for what you originally wanted. Some Pak’n'Save stores even have a zig-zag course through the grocery section as the only method of entry, just in case you want some courgettes on your way to pick up a six pack.
Brightly coloured tags on the shelves might point you in the direction of a sale item, or they may just say something meaningless like ‘Everyday low price!’ to draw your attention to the items the store wants to shift. At the checkout queue either you or your children may be feeling tired and peckish, which is why there are shelves full of chocolate there.
None of this is to say that supermarket owners are especially evil or manipulative – they just have a lot of money invested and to invest and are good at their jobs. The good news is that knowledge is power, and you can fight back.
Firstly, stay out of the supermarket as much as possible. If you can do all your shopping in one go it’s easier to stick to a budget and avoid impulse buys. A great way to do this is to shop online. This bypasses the in-store neuromarketing, reduces the time and stress of shopping, and removes the need to drive to the store in the first place.
You can easily check what’s left over at your house, and if you have the time, you can Google the eco/ethical credentials of potential purchases before selecting them. And because the system adds up your bill as you go, you can stick to your budget without having to abandon things at the checkout. Once you have cracked the supermarket’s website you are more likely to discover other more ethical online choices. If you get hungry while online shopping, you make yourself a much cheaper snack than you would probably buy in the store.
If you have to go in, you could take own mp3 player to keep you going while you read all the labels, but you should definitely take a detailed budgeted list of what you want and ignore aisles you don’t need to go down.
Aim low, but keep in mind that even actual sale items are infinitely more expensive than not buying them if you don’t need them in the first place. Some of the ‘own brand’ products, as well as being relatively cheap, can be quite healthy, with less salt and sugar than goes into some of the more well known tastes. Look at the unit price, not the overall price. Buying in bulk can save you money, save on packaging and save the number of car rides to the store. But you obviously need to ensure that the product won’t spoil before it’s used in your home.
What do the experts recommend? Laura Faire recently worked with Kathryn Hawkins on the book Shop Local, Eat Well – Cooking with Seasonal Produce in New Zealand. She says the key is to shop for simple unprocessed ingrediants which are local and in season.
“The best way to shop ethically is to buy New Zealand grown,” she says. “If you can buy in season it is cheaper too, and if you think about it supermarkets have an incentive to source locally. It’s all about shelf life. They offer the options, it’s up to consumers to buy them. The more local produce we buy the more they will put on the shelves.”
Seasonality can vary from region to region and store to store, so you may need to search online for a local guide, or ask a friendly gardener. Things can get tough to find around spring time, when everything is growing but nothing is ready.
Green Party MP Sue Kedgeley has a similar approach. She has been campaiging on food issues for more than a decade, and runs her own ‘Shop with Sue’ sessions to help guide people around their local supermarket.
She says, “Currently I don’t think it is getting easier in most places to shop healthy and even ethically.”
She reckons it’s not fair that if we want to know what’s in things, we have to rely on a ‘nutrition panel’ which often requires a magnifying glass to read and a chemistry degree to understand.
“Things have got better with eggs, at least you can check whether they are caged hens, barn hens or free range. That is some progress,” she says.
In the absence of the mandatory and legally binding country of origin standards she is pushing for, the supermarkets have started their own voluntary system for fruit and veg.
But a key point for Sue is your choice of which supermarket you go into in the first place. She recommends New World, Pak ‘n’Save and Four Sqaure, as they are all owned by Foodstuffs – a 100% New Zealand operation owned by a co-operative of the shop owners themselves.
Finally she asks: “If you have 50c for food and it’s a choice between a single vegetable and a packet of Maggi instant noodles, what’s it going to be?”
Erm…I’ll get back to you.
Tags: food, green living