Another supermarket caught up in scandal. But it says a lot for the reputation Booths has built up that everybody seems to agree they were being cheated by their suppliers. Still it might be interesting to see who else those suppliers were supplying. Now the National Food Crime Unit is investigating just how it happened that Booths were supplied with products labelled as British, when they came from South America and Europe instead.
Obviously this is a crime, but there is an interesting if slippery slope out there. So you can buy food from abroad, ‘process’ it in this country, and it is British. For BuyBritain.com the definition is “Have been significantly changed through a treatment or process within the UK” https://buybritain.com/blog/what-we-mean-by-british-made/
Then you have the Tesco fictional farms (other supermarkets doubtless have them) which appear on packaging to make the produce sound more locally sourced.
You might ask why Tesco didn’t just use real farms. But that is a path fraught with risk. After all, the real farm might show the same loyalty to the supermarket as the supermarkets show to farmers, and suddenly Little Wallop cheese is being sold by ASDA and Tesco has to frantically find a new source. Far safer to have an imaginary Little Wallop which is a brand wholly owned by Tesco.
But what also interested me is how little traction the story had in the media. The media was caught up in a feeding frenzy over Lineker. This time it wasn’t so much his obscenely high salary which was attracting attention, it was the fact that he was a cutting edge proponent of freedom of speech. I confess to being somewhat amused by the sheer number of my left wing friends who leapt to his support, so much so that I asked if they were “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes” and commented that it appears that we’re all Blairites now. I suspect it might be some time before they speak to me again.
But it does speak volumes. We had the storm over no tomatoes, but it’s blown over. Various supermarkets have announced they now have plenty, and everybody has moved on. Our dependence for our daily bread on major retailers who prioritise immediate margin over long term national interest is not regarded as an important issue. Who appears on a late night TV sports programme apparently is.
I know the Romans talked about panem et circenses, bread and circuses, but Emperors took a personal interest in ensuring that the bread supply was guaranteed. We have a population, or at least the chattering classes of the population, who simply assume their bread will be provided and instead spend their time engrossed in the circuses.
I wonder what it will take before food moves up the agenda and becomes a matter of national importance. A 16% annual food price increase hasn’t done it. Temporary shortages haven’t done it. Will it take a reintroduction of rationing before the UK government (of any party) decides that food production in the UK is important?
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There again, what do I know. Speak to the experts.
As a reviewer commented, “Like the other two books in this series, Jim Webster gives us a perspective of farm life we may not have appreciated. Some of the facts given will come as a shock to non-farming readers, but they do need to be read. Having said that, there are plenty of humorous anecdotes to make the book an enjoyable read.”
Tagged: feeding frenzy, fictional farms, filthy rich, Gary Lineker
Jim Webster 
Thank you, Jim – to the point as always.
glad you enjoyed it 🙂
Agreed. Why oh why do people not speak up? Are they so ignorant or soft as to attach to unimportant issues and, even then, move on after just a short while?
I think they’re so divorced from the reality of the situation. We have a major war in Europe, which makes the whole underlying food supply issue potentially difficult and they’re in a tizzy about an overpaid television personality 😦
Hear, hear! I couldn’t believe it… there’s a horrible war in Ukraine, people killing each other in the Middle East tit-for-tat, people dying and maimed around the world after natural and man-made disasters and the BBC leads with Gary ****** Lineker for days on end.
(Don’t ask me why my husband stays tuned to the BBC instead of switching to a less biased news channel… Or at least channnel-hopping to get a spread of bias. He’s getting on though and losing track of the remote control’s capabilities.)
We survived rocketing prices and 15% mortgage interest on a single income through 1980-1990’s with 4 kids, but I must admit, we too have since got used to spending on things we really don’t need. We need to now accept that we’ll be paying more for our food, at least in the foreseeable (and for our Health Service permanently, if we want it to remain National). Time to reassess priorities.
Very much so
With respect, Jim, you are conflating two entirely different issues. Lineker’s stance on refugee matters brought attention to an appallingly cruel attitude to refugees that exceeds even the worst days of Australia’s own heartless response on that matter. I totally agree that food security and the cynical exploitation of farmers by supermarket chains, supported by Governments, is a national and international scandal but resenting the fact that another unconscionable situation is grabbing the headlines is unproductive. Perhaps a more fruitful strategy would be recruiting those with a national profile, like Lineker, to the cause.
The problem with refugees is not like Australia’s at all. Imagine in your case the Refugees had already landed in New Zealand where they were safe, and still tried to travel illegally to Australia
The refugees crossing the channel are crossing from France. They’re not oppressed, France and the EU are safe countries. Under international law they should register there, in safety, and then if they want to move to the UK, apply normally.
At one point an awful lot of the refugees were Albanian men, and so many of them were coming to work for Albanian criminal gangs already working in the UK. So many of these criminals were on Albania’s wanted list that by announcing that Albanian police officers would be part of the processing for illegal migrants, the flow stopped.
I take your point about opportunists and criminals. I was talking about providing safe harbour to genuine refugees and the UK is one of the poorest performers in Europe on this matter.
There are a number of reasons. One reason is a growing resistance within the population to more inward migration. One in six of our population was born outside the UK. Interestingly the resistance to more people coming in is also strong within our ethnic minority populations. After all, they came here legally, jumped through all the hoops, and don’t see why people who leave a perfectly safe country like France should be allowed to stay with no papers etc.
People want to call a halt and give us time to try and get properly settled (and speaking English) those people we already have. Another reason is population density. If you take England (because England has been taking most of the refugees,) we’re the second most densely populated country in Europe. If we take the UK we drop to fourth most densely populated. We just feel full, We’re running out of houses, we’re getting to the stage we feel we’re running out of places to build houses without destroying the countryside. Indeed in the South East where most migrants settle because that’s where the jobs and opportunities are, we are getting to the stage where we probably cannot build more houses because we’re running out of water, and in some areas they’re banning the building of houses because we cannot get enough electricity into the area. (Mainly due to somebody giving permission to build too many data centres)
I think the main factor is that people cannot see why somebody who has the money to pay a people smuggler can get in whilst those who are trying to do things properly but don’t have that sort of money cannot.
The whole system in the UK probably needs a shake up. We have young men who aren’t allowed to work because they haven’t got the papers. Yet they’re skilled men, a lot of them had good jobs (hence could afford to pay people smugglers) and could be an asset. Yet they’re stuck in hotels, bored. Why on earth aren’t they allowed to work, at least once their English is good enough?
If it’s any comfort at all (and I know it’s not) we have exactly the same conundrums and challenges and debates here, despite our land mass.
yes I can well imagine
There is now a theory that people divide into two groups, ‘the citizens of nowhere’ who don’t have any loyalty to a particular area and their culture is such they’ll find it in the shopping Malls and universities anywhere.
Then there are those people who live here and their identity is built on living here. The brexit referendum is said to have divided people somewhat on those lines. It was Blair and the first group who accelerated immigration and it is the second group, normally treated with contempt, who want things to slow down a bit so those who have come in can find their feet and have a chance to become part of the community and become more British
I mention ‘food scarcity’, or ‘food resilliance’, and people’s eyes glaze over these days, or they say various versions of, ‘the pandemic’s over now and everything is back to the way it was before.’ … bloody ijits.
People never like policies which force them to change the comfortable parts of how they live 😦
Reblogged this on Have We Had Help? and commented:
Nowt wrong with British Beef!