Figure 2 'Lure of the Aisles' Martin Parr/Magnum Photos
America emerged from the Second World War as a global power and its influence on Britain’s mainstream society was profound with consumerism as the spearhead. People now had more money to spend and they could afford new luxury goods that would have once have been too expensive, or accessible in their locality “consumption was no longer about utilitarian need, but status and comfort22”. Arguably, Tesco brought the world’s food to high-streets and suburbs around the UK, but redeveloped it for the mass British consumers taste. It appears to be that as long as the British people are able to eat the world’s larder from their local Tesco they don’t consider what is in their food or where it comes from, described by Architect and Food Writer Carolyn Steel, ‘British Food Culture is little short of schizophrenic’23. ‘To read the Sunday papers you would think we were a nation of rampant gastronomes, yet few of us know much about our food or care to invest time and effort in it’24. This British Schizophrenia was perfect for the supermarkets that supply our food, but also for the Global Food System that so many of us don’t consider when putting together our weekly meals. As long as people are fed and satisfied before sitting in front of the television of an evening, they do not consider the cost of how they have been fed, ‘We have become so used to eating cheaply that few of us question how it is possible to buy a chicken for less than half the cost of a packet of cigarettes. Fast forward to the present day and food is the most devalued commodity in the industrialised West25 yet the Global Food System powers on churning out our food to the mass consumerists who sit, blinkered, in full-bellied bliss.
22 Ibid. 23 Steel, C. (2013). Hungry city: how food shapes our lives. London: Vintage Books Pg. 5 24 Ibid Pg. 5 25 Ibid Pg. 51
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