I think they’re super

What bollocks. In this article, supermarkets are being criticised for supplying a greater variety of food, of better quality, at a cheaper price. The author criticises the accurate, computerised monitoring of customer demand that allows supermarkets to predict what customers will want and order it fresh and in bulk each day so that the demand is met as precisely as possible, as bringing despair to farmers and being the antithesis of a free market.

The idea seems to be that if food is cheap enough to allow people to eat as much as they want, we will get fatter, and local farmers might go out of business. Because the food they supply is of lower quality, more expensive and of less variety. Well, no shit, local farmers.

Somebody is producing the food sold in the supermarkets, and in every other industry, producers have to compete in the market. The reason hand–crafted furniture sells at a premium to mass–produced IKEA is because it is perceived to be of better quality. Is the suggestion that in this one area alone, we should ban supermarkets and eat more expensive, worse food in order to help local farmers and because the expensive, low grade food would cause us to lose weight?

Far from being the negative factor scorned by the article, the introduction of kumquats, year–round fresh vegetables, vine tomatos and so on by supermarkets is a damn good thing for the British diet. The article seems to hark back to a good old British “we’d buy what the farmers brought to the back door and if there wasn’t enough, we went without” Blitz mentality. This is not a good thing. Who wants to go back to eating the odd apple in season and spending the rest of the year subsisting on Mother’s Pride sliced white and dripping sandwiches? For customers, supermarkets are the way forward.