My Curriculum Vitae

Lately, I've been reading a book called Not on the Label - What Really Goes into the Food on your Plate written by a Felicity Lawrence. Lawrence is a Londoner, who works as a journalist and editor and writes about food related topics and issues. This book was published in 2004, quite a few years ago, but it's definitely a book worth reading. The book, as the title rather clearly suggests, is about food that we purchase at the supermarket, and all the issues that revolve around that food. So it's not only about manufaturers loading their products with E-something substances and other unhealthy stuff, but also about issues such as migrant workers, environmental effects, farmers, public health diseases etc. She manages to touch upon all those topics by writing about only 9 common products that we all buy: chicken, salad, bread, beans, apples, bananas, coffee, prawns, and the ready meal.

I've only read the bread and apples chapters, and half of the salad and bananas ones, and it's already been enough to change the way I buy products. Yesterday, I went to the Whole Foods Market where they primarily sell organic things and guarantees farmers and workers a fair price rather than my local supermarket. This book is quite revolutionizing. It's not that people don't know about these issues, but I think people don't want to know about them, but once you read this book, it really makes you think twice about buying whose products and where.

I want to write a few things regarding the apple chapter. In this chapter, Lawrence goes around to orchards and to talk to farmers, workers, supermarket managers, etc. She meets multiple farmers who's had to close their apple businesses because they were suffering from too much losses. She focuses on the supermarket chains in the UK, e.g. Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury's etc., but her findings are applicable to most supermarkets in the world, because this is really becoming a global crisis.

In the UK, supermarkets are increasingly importing and buying their apples abroad rather than locally, even when it is the British season for apple harvesting. Countries with more suitable climates and less expensive labour have been able to offer supermarket chains cheaper apples than their local British farmers. However, this means that the cheaper apples' labourers can barely survive on that minimum price, and also caused a great number of British farmers to become unable to keep up with the competition and put down their orchards and farms altogether. Because the 4-5 main chain supermarkets control 75% of the entire grocery market in the UK, complaining farmers get delisted from being these chains' providers, and thus many farmers are afraid to speak out.

Also, there is a so-called "beauty parade" of not just apples, but all grocery products. A supermarket product must look appealing in front of a camera or it may be rejected by the supermarket. There are machines that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to install and operate for a factory, that measures the cosmetic appearance of these products. For instance, it measures the degree of blush of an apple by taking up to 70 photos of every single effing apple that passes it. If a supermarket has ordered to only take apples of 20% blush of red, then an apple of 19.5% would be detected and subsequently rejected. This causes an extremely great amount of products to be rejected and go to waste, and causes large sums of losses for farmers.

To keep up with these beauty standards, many farmers have to turn to chemical substances to fertilize and feed their trees and plants, because size is also a reason for rejection. Brussel sprouts are grouped into two sizes by supermarkets, either 25-30mm or 30-35mm in diameter. A carrot grower also told Lawrence that for every 30 tonnes of carrots harvested, only 10 tonnes are actually used and bought by the supermarkets. Any carrot that is not entirely straight, that is a few degrees bent, get rejected. Also, because of these cosmetic standards, organic farms have a freaking hard time keeping up. They cannot resort to using chemical substances to beautify their products, so even more of their products go to waste.

This ridiculous beauty parade. I understand that buyers want products that look nice and fresh, but knowing this, from now on, I will not give a damn that my carrot is bent like a horse shoe, or that my potato has an ugly dent in its surface. Fuck blushes and supermarkets.