Time, Space and Oranges

This morning, a total stranger gave me an orange.

The man was also absent-mindedly waving an orange flag, and it was this which I noticed first. It is a long walk all the way up West Street towards Sheffield university, and at about 10.30am, and three weeks before Christmas, the pavement was extremely busy. I thought he was trying to flag down the overcrowded bus, amidst the throngs of people in the street. It was only when he came up to me and asked if he could give me an orange did I spare him a second thought.

I was also half asleep, and also in a hurry. I am one of those uncaring people who secretly hopes that the person walking along r e a l l y s l o w l y in front of you will soon fall down a manhole cover or something, I hate to admit it, but I don't often pay much attention to people around me. As such, being given an orange in the middle of the street by a bloke with a flag was a bit of a shock. So much so, in fact, that I just muttered "thank you", carried on going, and didn't even register the incident enough to ask WHY he was handing out oranges. It was only when, a little further up the road, another man stopped me with an orange that I worked out what was going on. The second bloke had the common sense to hand out flyers with his oranges. They were trying to raise awareness for a homelessness charity, based in Orange Street, Sheffield. Had I looked at what was in my hand, I would have noticed that each orange has a slip of paper with a website address on it. All very well and good, but not exactly immediately obvious to the semi-conscious commuter. To give them a helping hand, the charity has a blog here. Giving out oranges is innovative, and I am grateful for my unexpected vitamin shot this morning. I have a lot of respect for these people now.

However, the whole incident has got me pondering again. Such is the depth of my projects at the moment that I cannot experience isolated incidents without reading a great deal in to them, especially if they involve food. The orange has now interested me a great deal.

The advertising did work, eventually, in that I have now looked at their blog. Ben's Centre is a charity providing support and a safe environment for Sheffield's street drinkers. They are now based in Orange Street in Sheffield, and have seemingly adopted the orange as their logo. The fruit becomes a space, and with a bit of publicity, the space becomes a place. The space will become fruitful. The space also develops an identity of its own through its citrussy badge: a sanctuary - bright, colourful and cheerful, orange being a colour as well as a fruit. Healthy and healing- oranges are full of good vitamins and are great for dealing with hangovers. And given a community, an ideology and an identity of its own, the space has become a place.
(That, incidently, came from my own meanderings around the subject of oranges. I've just checked the "Ben's Logo" page on their site, and as it happens, I am spot on. That was exactly what they had intended to do with the logo. Which either means they are very clever or I have worked in the community/charity sector before. Both are true.)
But where did the orange come from? The website says... Tescos. Bah. I had been hoping for more than that somehow, although kudos to Tescos for donating said orange. There is no labeling on the orange apart from Ben's website. I have no way of telling where this orange originated. The chances are it was grown in some tropical but very poor country, and flown thousands of miles around the world, before getting scrubbed, waxed, weighed and regulated by Tesco's buyers, then chucked in a box and donated to the people on Orange Street around the corner. This orange is probably more well-travelled than I am, and is doing far more to help humanity than me. As such, I felt very guilty about eating it, I am not worthy!

There are a lot of tricky issues to do with the journey of this orange - environmental objections to the C02 emissions caused by flying oranges around the world, first world apologists who knowingly exploited third world orange growers and the inherent inequality of global capitalism. So far, so unoriginal. There is no connection with the orange farmer here, globalisation means that oranges are available ubiquitously, and unwittingly detaches us even further from thinking about what we really eat. The orange helps Ben's Centre create an imagined/constructed locality, but this is not the locality of the fruit's origin.

I for one have a keen interest in the Slow Food movement - which, in practical terms, means celebrating local and seasonal food, no forced, high yield crop growing. Slow, because you have to wait for the right season to get various different fruits or vegetables, negating the need to ship fruit around the globe. Celebrating home cooking too, none of the highly processed 'fast food'. Celebrating actually engaging with food again. If I followed this ideology to the letter, this would normally mean no oranges, especially not in December in Sheffield.

But in one sense at least, I have engaged with this orange, and that is in part to do with Ben's Centre. As well as raising awareness of a very worthy cause, they provided me with a welcome breakfast, and food for thought. It made me think about where I was and what I was doing, which in all seriousness, is a rarity. I like to think I do engage with the space known as Sheffield. I love this city, and I greatly enjoy my time here. Yet every time I am here, I rush up the hill at top speed, worrying about being late for meetings or lectures, generally with my head lowered, stooped under the weight of laptops and the enormous piles of academic papers I have so many good intentions of reading -later. I am usually in a bad mood, because my train has been nearly always late/cancelled/very very slow/overpriced. Sometimes I have headphones on, blotting out the world around me in favour of listening to Muse sing songs about the Knights of Cydonia or something equally obscure. Mentally and emotionally, I am not really in that space.
But really, why am I in such a rush? No-one at university is really going to mind if I am ten minutes later. Once on a train, I have absolutely no control over its speed, and there is no point in getting cross with it if I can't do anything about it. I ought to appreciate the time I have on trains, to appreciate the journey itself instead of impatiently awaiting the destination. I should take an interest in the city around me, the people that I nearly walk in to, for example, the charity workers who stand out with orange flags trying to gain your attention for long enough to give you an orange with a website on it. In the time it takes me to walk up the hill, there are half a dozen charity workers making breakfast for homeless people, my lecturers prepare their talks for that morning, my train heads on its way towards Plymouth, a Tescos employee stacks the fruit shelves in store, and no doubt, someone on the other side of the world starts picking oranges. As much as there is to be said for the Slow Food movement, perhaps there ought to be a drive towards a Slow Travel movement too, to encourage you to use you time wisely, to think of all the things happening simultaneously in the world, and to appreciated the created spaces around you. And to merrily suck on very social oranges.

Supermarket Psychology and the biography of my pumpkins

I am sitting in a rather sterile cafe in a supermarket in Darlington. Darlington has a small and rather obscure claim to fame - it is not only one of the few towns left in Britain which does not have a Tesco, we also officially saw them off - nearly 90% of the population rejecting Tesco's bid for planning permission. This is all well and good, until you realise that instead of Tesco, we have two Asdas, two Morrisons, Sainsburies, two Icelands, LIDL, ALDI and two Nettos. And Darlington is not a big town by any stretch of the imagination. It is, supposedly a market town though. And we do have a local market, the indoor one open 6 days a week, and an open market on Mondays and Saturdays. But no-one goes to it. Many stalls do not last very long, and those that do are hardly make a great deal of money. I had a stall for a while, and can vouch for the idea that being a market trader is neither fun nor profitable, and I know I wasn't alone in thinking that. There are various excuses for this decline in the market - recently restructuring of the town centre has meant that the bus routes no longer go close to the market to bus in the old ladies, the weather is usually pretty appalling so nobody wants to shop outdoors etc etc.... but the real problem is that people selling food on a small scale, and selling locally produced, seasonal goods, cannot compete with cheaper, mass produced, exotic and year-round food available conveniently from supermarkets.

Market forces! This is what capitalism is about! I hear ye cry. Supermarkets are phenomenally successful and popular for a reason, and that reason must be that people actually want to shop in them. If they didn't, then supermarkets wouldn't make any money, much like the market stalls. But is it really as simple as that? Supermarkets disconnect people with the produce they are buying. They are easy, convenient, entirely because you don't have to think about the shopping. Its merely a chore to be performed each week, hopefully as quickly as possible and with minimum fuss. Everything is in one place, and right in front of you. There is no hunting for the right things, no running between different stalls to get meat, veg, fruit, dry goods, cleaning materials...just trundling up and down the neat, accessible aisle, equipped with an oversized basket on wheels to help you. People go to supermarkets to get 'food for the week' or to 'pick up something nice for dinner', not for the experience of finding a new foodstuff, or even to enjoy the task at hand. Not, in short, to connect in anyway with the food on offer.

Today I am in Sainsbury's. I walk in - this in itself is unusual since the whole place is designed to be driven to - and I am greeted by a giant cardboard pumpkin, holding shelves full of edible pumpkins, and the slogan, "Try something new this Halloween". Along with my oversized squash, I am invited to pick up a free card detailing Jamie Oliver's recipe for pumpkin soup. Its not exactly original. Pumpkin boiled up with onion and chicken stock and a bit of ginger so it sounds exotic. Mine is far more interesting, in my humble opinion. On the back, there is another recipe for Rice Laska Soup which does involve pumpkin, along with lime leaves, chinese five-spice and coconut milk, all of which are available in a British store, in late October, obviously. The pumpkins are enormous, mine is a good foot across, and all for 99p. The Halloween sticker on it gives no clue as to where it was grown. When I did get it home (its weight providing another good reason why most people drive to supermarkets), it carved beautifully, and there is now an evil looking Jack O Lantern in the window. I also cruelly turned its innards into soup, and even with my extra spicy Carribean recipe (with chilli oil, ginger, nutmeg and orange juice) it tasted very very bland indeed. The pumpkin didn't even roast well, just turning to mush in the oven. These pumpkins were grown specifically to be enormous as Halloween decorations, not to eat. They were pumped full of water, size and price at the expensive of flavour and quality.

This pretty much sums up the whole supermarket experience for me. A great deal of literature has already been written on the topic of how evil supermarkets are; I have already mentioned the threat to smaller food retailers, but on top of that there is exploitation and domination of third world producers, sweatshop and child labourers, the energy and resources wasted in the 'food miles' associated with shipping, for example, strawberries in October, all the way from 'Israel' (read: occupied Palestinian territories). Commodity chains get longer and longer and more and more complex, and the consumer is removed even further from the producer. And you really do not want to know what they do to chicken... (adding beef proteins, for the record, which help the meat absorb and retain nearly 50% added water. Legally, too. Note to the reader: reading Felicity Lawrence's 'Not On The Label' can make you anorexic)

I do not want or need to reiterate any of that. What I am more concerned with is quality, or lack of it. I am not denying that supermarkets are cheap and convenient, nor that they offer a great deal of choice and variety. What I am questioning is their ability to provide consistent quality and value for money. Of course, it always looks so tempting, all the exotic, colourful fruits that are intentionally placed at the front of the store to seduced you in, or the enticing aromas of freshly baked bread that are deliberately blown around the shop... and it works, I always spend more money than I intended, and get really into the idea of cooking, every time I go in there. I am weak and gullible and naive.

On average, we spend about 10% of our incomes on feeding ourselves. This is not a great deal, and in fact, is less than we did 30 years ago. But the poorest fifth of the population still spend over 30% of their incomes on food. Significantly, the lower your income, the more likely you are to be overweight, or have diet-related illnesses. This seems to be because, the cheaper the food, the more more processed it is likely to be. And the more processed it is, the more fat, sugar, salt and additives it is likely to contain. Here are some examples from Sainsbury's.

'free range' chicken breast fillets - 350g for £3.99, and tikka masala cooking sauce, £1.49 or:
Chicken Tikka Masala (canned, serves 2) for 89p
Fresh Mango (from South Africa), 99p each or
canned mango slices in syrup, 39p
Lincolnshire sausages, 2 packs of six for £4 or
frozen Toad-in-the-Hole, microwavable for £1.99

Depressing, isn't it? This is not to say, however, that the more money you spend, the better the food will be. Skinny celebrities seem to be able to spend a great deal of money on eating not a lot at all. My 99p pumpkin was not processed into pre-made, salt and fat-ladened soup, (43p per can) but it is highly likely that it was grown outside of this country, shipped or even flown in, and given its size and lack of flavour, grown using a lot of unpleasant fertilisers and pesticides. I could go to the indoor market and buy one for 60p, but it would be a lot smaller, the skin might be blemished, and worse still, the market doesn't have a conveniently located car park and I would have to carry the thing home. On the up side, I can be assured that it was grown up the road on a farm near Richmond. About 8 miles away. And it might even taste like pumpkin!

I am now, for the first time in over two years, in a position where I can afford 'decent' food. I've always managed to save money on food because I love cooking, and prefer, for instance, to make sauces than to buy them in jars. I am finding myself being a bit more liberal with the food budget now- buying *good* meat from the market, which is fresher, local, less stuffed with nasty things, but twice the price of Sainsbury's. This does not however, mean that I am price-blind. Supermarkets have to make their money somehow, and going on the assumption that the majority of customers want to find what they need quickly and easily, means that supermarkets are likely to play tricks. Take, for example, last weeks Christmas pudding experience. Immediately in front of you as you walk in, is a rack of "snacking nuts and seeds." A snack sized bag of whole almonds (100g) will set you back £1.89. But walk to the back of the store to the 'baking' section, and I can get 100g of 'baking' almonds for £1.09.... which is not only daft, but infinitely frustrating, and totally deliberate on the part of the shop.

Basically, in supermarkets, you are paying cheaper prices, but through clever marketing and gratuitous trickery, you are paying for convenience and speed and packaging, not for quality or piece of mind. Supermarkets have taken over the country entirely because this is a compromise most consumers are willing to make.