Supermarkets

A challenge from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the Guardian:

For me, then, the true tipping point will come when significant numbers of consumers begin to say to the supermarkets: enough of your bullying tactics to farmers and producers, your misleading labelling and spurious nutritional information, enough of the systematic suffering of livestock in intensive systems, driven by you, as you push the price points lower and lower, enough of your dirty, polluting, wasteful food miles, and your outrageous, undemocratic flouting of planning law and the opinions of local people.

The way to be effective is to change the way you shop. You don’t have to stop going to supermarkets, but you do have to take from their shelves only those products you believe are honestly and ethically traded, transparently labelled, environmentally sustainable, and not abusive of either animals or people. And go elsewhere for the rest.

I agree with what he’s saying, though I wonder whether ‘going elsewhere’ is still the right thing to do if one has to make extra ‘food miles’ in driving to get there.

Hugh’s own site is Rivercottage.net.