Supermarket as airport

There was a brilliant piece in last week's Green Room on the BBC News site from Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation (Nef). Andrew details the massive environmental and socioeconomic costs of the implacable rise and rise of the Supermarket. A key quote:

"Supermarkets have trained us to believe that nothing but affordability should constrain what, when or how much we consume."

For me, supermarkets have a rootless quality of identity, a bit like airports; their products are branded like ever-cheaper flights to the most "exotic" global destinations. The rich geographic and socioeconomic context of the Product is subsumed within the supermarket's transnational brand.

Is there a way beyond this supermarket identity soup? A way to plug products back into the socioeconomic fabric, as they were when we bought a pork chop reared by Jim the farmer from Bill the local butcher? These are great questions for us to ponder...

Transparent footprints

Just how accurate are the much-trumpeted new supermarket "carbon footprint" product labels? Not very, according to Seamus McCauley. Seamus makes a cogent argument that supermarkets are still deliberately fudging the "carbon transparency" issue.

Supermarkets are making noises at the moment about labelling food that's been flown in as such (Times), so people can make informed choices about the environmental impact of their purchases. The theory goes that food that's been flown in from abroad has a far greater carbon footprint than food produced in the UK.

The theory doesn't hold up. The time food spends on a plane contributes an absurdly tiny proportion of its carbon footprint - far less than 1%, says Tim Harford in the FT. Effectively all of the pollution occurs at the stage when it's carted around the UK on lorries or, more importantly, driven out of the supermarket in shoppers' cars. See if you're interested the original DEFRA report into the matter from 2005.

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So how might we persuade supermarkets to become truly transparent to the identity, carbon costs and all, of their products? This sounds like a good topic for the Identity Society to ponder... : )