You are what you eat. Tesco’s and the ethical economy

He coined the term ‘clone town’ to describe the homogenisation of British high streets. Now, the author of Tescopoly explains to Alison Benjamin why the days of the all-consuming big supermarkets may be numbered

reports the Guardian

“Every Little Hurts” says the website.

Acting without impunity

It was Tesco’s seeming ability to act with impunity that fuelled Simms’ determination to write a book exposing how the inexorable rise of supermarkets is bad for everyone - from poorly paid workers in the field, to small, independent shops fast going out of business, to the over-exploited natural environment.

The culture of poverty

Simms’ thesis is essentially that supermarkets are pushing a social and economic “culture of poverty” across the world. Under the guise of creating employment, choice and low prices, he aims to show that the reality is that they are destroying jobs, diversity and the social glue that holds communities together. “There is the poverty of our ‘cloned’ commercial surroundings, the poverty of knowing the hardship of the people who fill the supermarket shelves, and overwhelming [spiritual] poverty of actually getting to and shopping in a big supermarket.

Clone Towns Simms writes

Supermarkets have had a terribly easy ride of it. People have taken on trust their promises about jobs and choice, but one of the reasons they are so profitable is that, pound for pound of consumer spending, they employ fewer people. When you see a Tesco Extra hypermarket on the edge of town what you are seeing is the surgical removal of the economic underpinning of neighbourhood and communities, to a sort of sanitised, laboratory environment, physically removed from the body.

Where is the truth? Today without the global distribution I cannot go into a local store and get the quality, perhaps, of the goods I want, but I have no choice where that produce comes from?

I pay top dollar for Organic? But do I want to pay the petro miles of the food? Why can’t that come locally?

Do we need to readdress the economic/ethics of living in an affluent society?

Junk food culture vs. the Third World Simms

draws parallels between chain stores and invasive species, compares our consumerist society to a diet of junk food, and describes unsustainable lifestyles in the west as being akin to badly parked cars in the supermarket taking up too much space to the detriment of people in the developing world.

Perhaps form a CDB perspective this is a network effect. The clich?s, “You reap what you sow’” and, “chickens always come home to roost.” may soujd like clich?s, however…

Alan Flectcher would say “you stoke a clich?, until it purrs like a metaphor.”

Either way, we are socially and economically rubbing up against eachother, in ways that previously were unthinkable.

Remember, YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT. In more ways that perhaps you care to think.