I live with a city girl.

I live with a city girl.

I live with a city girl. She is impulsive, fun and beautiful. She is also terrible in the morning and lively at night, has a demanding job and more interestingly for the purposes of this blog, a typical consumer.

If she is planning to cook dinner for the family, the first time she thinks about what to prepare is as she leaves the office. There are four Tesco stores, a Morrisons,  a Marks and Spencer food shop on her route home. There is a Waitrose, LIDL, Coop, Budgens and Sainsbury’s and another Tesco within 3 miles from our house. She leaves the office around 1830 and it’s a 40-minute drive home if she comes straight home. If she is cooking, she stops to buy the food. By the time she is home at around 1930hrs, our two teenagers are ravenous and she is tired. Inevitably these are factors in her decision-making as she drives home, alongside:

• ·      Perceived quality of the supermarket
• ·      Time taken to prepare the food once home
• ·      Her perceived idea of whether it is “good” for the boys.
• ·      Time taken to cook it.
• ·      Time taken to clear up afterwards.

So when I ask her to consider country and county of origin, LEAF Marque, Red Tractor and the non-branding of food (Happy Eggs, Non Existent farms), where do they sit in her priority list?

Farmers rightly become very precious about all of the above; me among them. If we spend 12 months adhering to stringent criteria laid down by the retailers, the least the consumer can do is support UK farmers? But if the only UK potatoes in the supermarket are in 10 kg bags and covered in mud, and pre washed potatoes from Majorca in grab bags are washed and at eye level on the shelf in Marks and Spencer, is it the consumer’s fault that they buy what suits their lifestyle, not what we want them to buy? There are similar examples in every food category.

At the weekend, my city girl can take her time to choose food from a local butcher or delicatessen, but when time is precious as it is for millions of consumers every day and food is as much a fuel than anything, it is hardly surprising that provenance is not top of the priorities in the supermarket. Pret a Manger, the national instant food company recently announced a 14% increase in sales; having just spent a week in London, I can see the popularity for every meal of the day. Their biggest seller was 5 million avocados. Marks and Spencer now say that 40% of the food purchased in their stores is eaten on the day of purchase. Priorities at these stores may not be provenance.