Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

Europe retail Switzerland
P… R… no Q!
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Switzerland’s biggest retail cooperative, Migros, is eliminating supermarket checkout queues. Customers using the Migros “subitoGo” application can scan their purchases on their smartphone and leave the store without further ado.

The system will be tried out at 80 outlets and rolled out if it proves successful. The software also links into any shopping list that might have been prepared before leaving home; fewer chances of leaving the store without a full complement of shopping.  SubitoGo combines the Italian word for suddenly and Go.

foraging fungi
Pick what you know
peter 1
Artwork copyright: Helena Barcraft-Barnes 2021

In the late 1970s, Richard Mabey sparked a passion for wild food with his bestselling book Food For Free. The title said it all and cleverly encapsulated a town dweller’s view of nature as an endless source of food.

This is overstated. Of course, there are occasional gluts, but these are uncommon. Realistically, foraging is a source of garnishes rather than whole meals: carrying a basket is no guarantee of coming home laden with wild food to order. It is however a pleasant addition to an extended walk, taking in some of the seasonal colour.

Armed with a copy of Food For Free and George Kibby’s mushroom guide, some 45 years ago I started collecting wild fungi and other crops as I learnt about their characteristics and locations. To anyone who asks if it is safe to pick fungi, I have a standard answer: pick only what you know and walk past the rest. By learning how to positively identify one species of mushroom you can be sure that you will recognise it even if it turns up in a fresh location.

In time, by adding more species to the positive list, you can build a repertoire of reliable fungi: walking past the rest will save time in the field and, if the opportunity occurs, you can always pick specimens to identify upon your return home. Just don’t mix the unidentified specimens with your supper without first making sure that they are an edible variety.

Over the years, I have been fortunate enough to encounter a paddock full of giant puffballs in Shropshire, most of which were skull-sized and some of which were bigger than a beach ball. On another occasion I spotted a cauliflower fungus the size of a large hen; when walking alongside canals in the Black Country I would routinely pick wild celery, which is widespread and as large as the cultivated variety, with a strong preference for damp soil. But, apart from the wild celery, wild food has been a bonus rather than a reliable or significant addition to the menu.

customs clearance livestock plants
Animal, vegetable, mineral
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These three words help us to navigate the arcane world of customs codes, which do in fact follow logical rules. The underlying structure is called the Harmonised System. This is made up of groups of traded commodities, referred to as chapters which add up collectively as a schedule. Merchandise is listed in the order animal, vegetable and mineral.

The first part of the Constitutio Renovata (reformed regulations) displayed on a board at the port in Lyme Regis, dated 1489. It lists the harbour charges and duty for goods unloaded there.
The first part of the Constitutio Renovata (reformed regulations) displayed on a board at the port in Lyme Regis, dated 1489. It lists the harbour charges and duty for goods unloaded there.

The opening chapters cover live animals, followed by carcases and meat, moving on to animal products. Animals are followed by fish. Plants come next and are similarly classified in the order of seeds, then plants followed by retail fruit and vegetables.

A guide to the detail of customs classifications is in preparations and will be downloadable from this page in the coming weeks.

Europe fish France sardine
What Mona Lisa tells us about sardines
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Sardines in the Mediterranean are now smaller and lighter than 20 years ago.  Mona Lisa is a European project which has been studying sardine populations in the region and has established that the average lengths of sardines had fallen from 15 centimetres to 11 and the average weight has nosedived from 30 grams to 10.

Researchers attribute the dramatic decline to a 15% drop in stocks of micro-algae in the bay of Biscay, which has lowered the nutritional value of plankton. The study carried out by the French marine institute Ifremer was able to rule out overfishing and natural predators such as dolphins or tuna. It also established that there was no virus to blame for the dramatic decline.

The  changing composition of plankton was investigated using a controlled sardine population  of 450 fish divided into four groups and fed differing strengths of plankton. This is the largest project of its kind anywhere in the world.

The sardine is one of the most heavily fished species in the world. The high demand from canneries creates a commercial value for sardines within a certain size range. Changing the size of sardine cans would entail substantial costs for retooling packing lines, not to mention major revisions to packing and cooking protocols for the autoclaves.

foraging fungi
Summer fungi in November
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Today is November 7 and this morning I picked these shaggy parasols, a fungus that I used to pick in July August or September 40 years ago. We ate them for supper. But I struggle to decide whether of not they are an out of season treat. On balance, probably not, since the season has shifted rather than the fungi.

France retail
Four percent is history
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Within living memory, a grocery business was considered successful if it earned a margin of three or four percent, but in the late 20th century supermarkets rewrote the rules.

Grocery multiples expect suppliers to have deep pockets and fund special offers at the drop of a hat.

Call it shelf money; marketing assistance; listing fees, the multiples started asking for — and getting — sums in the order of GBP 5000 a year per Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) for listing a product in an agreed number of stores (usually hundreds). Bearing in mind that a large supermarket will stock about 20,000 SKUs, some of which will be furnished by more than one supplier, the country’s major multiples are trousering millions in readies up front, without giving suppliers so much as a cat in hell’s chance of their money back if an SKU is delisted.

There are many ways the multiples can extract whatever money they feel a supplier should cough up: withholding invoice settlements; requiring suppliers to pay for Point Of Sale promotional material; special offers (these are always funded by the supplier); the list is a long one.


So the grocer that used to eke out resources to earn three or four percent has been consigned to history. France’s biggest retailer, Michel-Edouard Leclerc went on the record in October 2007 to say that a hypermarket needs to earn a margin of 25%. I saved the URL*, but Leclerc has deleted the blog post since then, leaving a rather fancy 404 page shown in the picture.

 * http://www.michel-edouard-leclerc.com/blog/m.e.l/archives/2007/10/index.php?date=20071025#000727

cultivation livestock plants
Settling down
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Reading the preface of James C Scott’s book Against the Grain, I realised that it promises to live up to my expectations. Scott disentangles the timelines of settled agriculture, which is only possible with domesticated crops and livestock. The process of domestication was spread over millenia in the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates, starting around 8000BCE. Domestication was an essential step on the way to settling in a fixed location.

Establishing crop-fields attracted species that were later domesticated.

Establishing permanent crop-fields attracted wildlife such as ducks and other fowl that could, like fire or food crops, also be domesticated. Scott argues that the process of domestication is reciprocal, since humans adapted in subtle ways to the livestock they wanted to keep.

There is a lot of detail to absorb, so it will be a while before I return to discussing his analysis of the history of the region that later became Mesopotamia and Sumeria. Scott is published by Yale University Press.