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Two cheers for Tesco

Another day, another outbreak of mass outrage against Tesco. With good reason, too: Britain’s biggest retailer, which takes in £1 out of every £7 spent on the high street, turns out to have been buying from an Indian textile factory whose workers are lucky to get paid £7 a week. (No wonder those T-shirts are so cheap). And, it seems, Tesco is no kinder to animals. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s been protesting at the Tesco AGM about the way the firm treats chickens.

As the world’s third biggest retailer, Tesco has a responsibility to keep to acceptable international standards on labour. A stormy AGM may have been just what Tesco bosses need to remind them that they urgently need to sort out these problems, and make sure there are no more.

In the more organically-minded bits of London, reports like these are like a red rag to a bull. Cue foaming at the mouth about the wickedness of global corporations. Cue hand-wringing about the lost charms of small-scale, innocent shopping, from proper butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.

But, before we consumers get too carried away, it might be worth remembering what food shopping was really like before there was a bright, cheap, all-hours Tesco on every street corner.

It was grim. Forget the fresh coriander and kiwis now brought to our tables courtesy of the supermarkets. My childhood memories of trailing along behind a hassled mum with bags stuffed with Seventies fish fingers, sliced bread, mince and custard powder, are of a miniscule range of dull products – local shopkeepers didn’t feel any urgent need to entice in their captive audience – and not particularly cheap prices. And the time it all took! The walks, the waits! A queue in every shop! Lucky, in some ways, that so many of that generation of mums didn’t work. What with all the shopping, even if they’d had jobs, they’d never have had time to get to them.

Today’s supermarkets are far from ideal. But for price and choice and convenience – now that both men and women work, and are short of time – they still beat the last generation’s shopping solutions hollow.

If my dreams came true, I would only ever shop in Borough Market, where every steak and cheese comes from an animal which has enjoyed a happy life frisking around buttercup fields, and where every bit of luscious fruit and earthy veg has been treated with respect.

I’d probably be healthier and wiser. But not wealthier – all that 21^st-century nostalgia for an imaginary perfect past doesn’t come cheap. And I’d never be able to fit in work, family, the plumbers and the school run at the same time. So reality dictates that I mostly make do with the supermarket. And Tescos (once it’s sorted out its labour issues) still gets a tentative two cheers from me.

ENDS