Was this photo taken in the UK or in Poland?

In the last 30-40 years the food grown, bought, cooked and eaten in the UK has undergone enormous change as indeed have eating habits, meal patterns and the role of food in the family. Gardening, shopping and eating patterns today would be almost unrecognisable to someone who had not lived through this time. For those over 40 little remains of the patterns of childhood as you can hear repeatedly in all our UK food interviews. To tell someone younger that it would have been difficult to find a pizza before the 1970’s produces disbelief.

Attitudes of dependence increasingly characterise food - dependence on hypermarkets, dependence on convenience food, dependence on fashion for taste, dependence on dietary health advice from the media, dependence on ‘sell by/ use by’ dates - the passing down of skills and traditions through families is much less influential than before. There is a strong sense of guilt connected with food, especially that of the past. The increasing cultural mix has brought a great deal of variety with peoples of each culture adopting dishes from the others. Many of the articles in The Guardian special reports refer to this period as an unquestioned food revolution - but also see it as an unquestioned food crisis.

Here are some figures from these articles to give you an idea of the situation in Britain

• Approx 40% of all trucks on the roads in the UK are carrying food (e.g. Tesco trucks travel 224 million kms every year)
• 80%+ of all UK food passes through the tills of just four supermarket chains - typically each contains 30,000 lines
• Tesco controls 26% alone and made £1.3 billion profit in 2002
• Possibly as many as 50% of those preparing fresh food or employed in packhouses are illegal and/ or foreign workers
• Just over 1% of the population work in agriculture
• The average farm size is over 70 hectares
• The 6 Safeway distribution centres supply 480 supermarkets - 10% of all the food bought in Britain passes through them
• 30% of UK food is eaten out - and this seems not to include convenience foods, ready-prepared for reheating at home
• In 2002 1.8 billion sandwiches were sold in the UK

To find out more on the state of food in the UK go to UKinfocus - a British Council site devoted to giving an updated perspective on life in the UK for language learners. Tellingly they chose food as their first theme. See also our web review of this site.

Polish attitudes to food in Britain

Food in Britain/ British Food - attitude survey results show that many people in the education system in Poland only partially recognise these changes and are unaware of just how much UK society has changed. The article English Food - impressions of a Polish student and Host family impressions of English food with accounts of actual visits balance this somewhat. The survey itself raises many issues concerning how opinions are formed including the role of ‘received opinion’, and the projection of the values of one culture onto those of another. An equivalent survey in Britain on Polish food would no doubt be similarly disparaging.

Tesco

Food in Britain and food in Poland have different traditions even if the ingredients are often the same, and contemporary practice differs widely in terms of dishes, attitudes, table manners and so on. The British hypermarket chain Tesco is a link however (and not only in Poland it has also made considerable investments in the neighbouring Slovak and Czech Republics as well as in Hungary) though if you visit a Tesco in one of these countries what you will find on the shelves will very rarely be the same as in the UK. What is the same however is Tesco itself, and its image, its marketing and methods of selling, and the way the people in all these countries actually go about buying their food. Tesco in a way provides a bridge between the UK and these countries but a cultural bridge via business rather than diet. With tastes, production and distribution globalising however, with its considerable market presence, Tesco is a part of the future of food in all these countries.

During the summer school a visit was made to Tesco in Krakow (which is also the HQ of their Polish operation).

Guardian Special Reports

In the spring of 2003 The Guardian newspaper published a very wide range of articles on the state of food in Britain under such headings as The way we eat now and Why we eat this way and they are one of the sources for this item. They are very useful for raising awareness, provoking discussion and supplying background information. Here is just a selection with some opening quotations to give you an idea of their contents though the titles alone tell you a great deal. If you want to read more from those that appeal to you - click on the links. Many further articles can be found via these or you can update yourself via The Guardian archive - see our web review.

Food in Britain

Food has four seasons www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,961407,00.html

Britain is the cheap food capital of the world. That is not the same as saying that the food in Britain is actually cheap. In fact, it is possibly the most expensive in Europe, but we devote less of our disposable income to buying it than any other European country. Price is the fundamental criterion by which food is judged.

Dish of the day www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,951902,00.html

Social division in the contents of a shopping trolley. We are what we eat. So what are we consuming today? We asked six households to keep track of everything they ate in a week. The results were revealing.

There are a number of other articles analysing the diets of individual households

The death of cooking www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,951915,00.html

"Yes," she said. "Our research says that only 17% of consumers aged between 21 and 35 have heard of common cuts of meat such as brisket, fore rib, chump and loin. Meat lovers aged between 36 and 50 did better; 68% knew what they were talking about; but they were eclipsed by 51-70 year olds, who not only knew which was which cut, but also knew how to cook them." The figures were a neat illustration of the dramatic decline in the country's cooking skills from one generation to the next.

Lattes and burgers fuel fast lifestyle www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,916366,00.html

Buy a quick caffe latte from a coffee shop, grab a takeaway burger, leave the cat with its own "single serve" convenience food, and rush to leap on a plane - not forgetting, of course, a liberal application of hair gel to counteract the effects of a high-speed existence. This is the life we now lead, as revealed in the office for national statistics' retail price index, published yesterday.

Take it away www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,951964,00.html

A third of the money we spend on food is spent on eating out - buying sandwiches, takeaways, and restaurant meals.

Food and the Hypermarkets

Lords of the aisles www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,956562,00.html

In 1985, there were over 23,000 high street butchers for example. By 2000, there were 9,721 left. Last year, small newsagents were closing at the rate of one a day. Nowadays, only 15% of consumers make use of specialist shops such as butchers, fishmongers and greengrocers.

It includes an A-Z of hypermarket terminology

To the moon and back www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,951969,00.html

Through the barrier is the Safeway regional distribution centre at Aylesford, just one of six nerve centres from which the retailer supplies its 481 or so stores round the country with fresh food. From this depot, 10 times the size of Wembley stadium, 170 38-tonne Safeway lorries are shunted into and out of 120 cavernous loading bays in an endless cycle, day and night, 363 days of the year. They transport up to 1.7m cases of groceries a week and, with the rest of the supermarket's fleet, clock up over 120m km a year - that's to the moon and back with a bit to spare.

Grower’s market www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,956536,00.html

For £2.99 in Marks and Spencer, you could until recently buy an elegantly small plastic tray of baby vegetables, each tiny bundle of asparagus shoots, tender greens, miniature corn, dwarf carrots, and premature leeks, tied together with a single chive. The chives were first flown out from England to Kenya. The plastic trays and packaging were flown out too. There African women worked day and night in refrigerated packing sheds next to Nairobi airport, turning the green stems into decorative ribbons around topped and tailed Kenyan produce. Then they were cling-wrapped, and air-freighted back to England again, a round trip of 8,500 miles.

Battle of the food chain www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,956610,00.html

In the last half century, nothing short of a revolution has taken place in the world of food. Every step along the chain - how it is grown, processed, distributed, retailed and cooked - has been transformed beyond recognition. Change is nothing new in the food world; it has always been traded, jumped continents and been shipped around. But never has so much power over the global food system been concentrated into the hands of so few

How Britain’s supermarket rivals stack up www.guardian.co.uk/supermarkets/story/0,12784,874639,00.html 

The figures on the biggest UK hypermarket chains

Food and Agriculture

The new landless labourers www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,956630,00.html

I am surrounded by young Iraqi men in a portacabin filled with cigarette smoke and urgent, loud talking. With characteristic Kurdish hospitality they insist on sharing with me the only food they have - a packet of Rich Tea biscuits - while we get to grips with what they are doing wearing hairnets on a farm in the middle of the Fens.

Illegal food workers exposed www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,957757,00.html

A huge government and police investigation has found that more than half of workers preparing fresh food in factories and packhouses for the big supermarkets are working illegally.

The lie of the land www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,956618,00.html

He would barely recognise the vale today. The orchards and hedgerows have been mostly grubbed up, there are few farms smaller than 300 acres, and there are more racehorses to be seen on the land than people. The village shops are full of processed foods and on the downs above the vale, one man may plough 400 acres a day in a giant satellite-controlled tractor. An estate owner, who employs just six people to farm 4,000 acres, earns perhaps £500,000 a year in wheat subsidies alone.

Food and Health

Take 6 oz of molecularly altered fat www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,956594,00.html

Can you understand the lists of ingredients on the backs of food packets? Those fancy scientific names conceal a tale of astounding technological sleight of hand - and it's all perfectly legal

A diet based on worry www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,951890,00.html

Our new Guardian ICM poll shows that we are worried about the health and safety of our food. We do not trust government or retailers to give us information about it. Nearly 80% of us think manufacturers are irresponsible in the way they advertise food to children.

After the break www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/story/0,13296,951972,00.html

… questions why so many food and drink ads target children