to think that the amounymt of junk food in the supermarkets is f*cking RIDICULOUS

[sallyseton]

whole AISLES dedicated to sweets, chocolate, crisps, cakes, biscuits etc!!! is sthere something wrong here or is it just me?

no wonder half the country's fat if every time we go shopping we're bombarded with all this. packaging is often designed to be most appealing to children, too.

there's an argument that supermarkets promote this food as unlike say, a potato, these foods do not go off quickly. so it is more profitable for them.

i am not a food nazi, i like chocolate etc as much as anyone else, i just think the choice on display is ridiculous and we all as a country probably eat too much of it.

there's a very good argument that says that if you want cake or something, you should make it yourself. that way you can see what goes into it (and no additives or preservatives) but because of the hassle involved it really will be a treat. i might try it.

oh, and nefore anyone flames me over using the word "junk" food, yes i do believe that the kind of preservative filled crisps etc you find at the supermarket are junk food, almost no nutritional value, unlikely to fill even the smallest
child up, abd the packaging will be thrown away and fester away in the earth, certainly not biodegradable.

i do feed my child crisps btw, but the
slightly healthier "baked" ones, and i am certainly not
judging anyone, feed your child anything you damn well please i just dont think we should have such a surfeit of crap in the supermarket!

ps i bought some light mayonnaise yesterday, it had a little sticker on it saying it was a good source of omega 3 and 6. MAYONNAISE!!! you have to be f*cking kidding me. these food companies are all damn immoral liars.

GetOrf.........I'm going to try and find the guts to do that when I go to Morrisons later

I like the sound of handing back the packaging at the till but I don't really see how it would work unless you put all your storage jars etc from home in the trolley.

you don't need storage jars for fruit, veg, "multi packs" of things which have extra packaging round can easily be chucked in a bag

Oh, just the unnecessary packaging
[dim]

DanJARMouse is even farther out.

20 miles to any place, really.

And the Tesco was already there when she got there.

I guess I could go rustle some cattle and sheep up the road. There's a lot of tasty-looking lambs out right now and, because Highland sheep have the right to roam, they can be downright pesky on the roads this time of year!

I reckon we could get a lot of burgers out of one of those Highland cows, too.

Farmer might not like it, he might prefer I went to Morrison's. But I'll just tell him this is an idyllic place to live and if I poach his livestock it's a lot healthier and cheaper.

• well that's how I take it anyhow - I don't realy have "storage jars" for anything at home. But I do throw away a lot of packaging before I've even packed the stuff into my cupboards ready for use.

oh god she is isn't she stuck up there.

You know - I can't remember exactly where she is - but I had a great friend at school (still in contact on FB atually) whose mum I think used to run a sports shop up there.

I hand back packaging to make the bags lighter as I have to carry them home!

I'm loving the sheer number of people who are using Waitrose and Ocado as bragging rights on this thread.

If I go into Tesco it's in an effort to get in and out as quickly as possible - no need to go near the chocolate aisle, I rarely go near the freezer section, down the fruit, veg, dairy, meat aisles, quick run down pasta-alley, quick complain that yet again our local one is sold out of sodding arborio rice - job done. Just because stuff's there you're under no obligation to buy it - but I still appreciate the option of cream cakes being available if I want to - because surprisingly, I'm an adult and I can make my own choices in life.

As for ready meals - lots of people can't cook. I couldn't until fairly recently - it's very easy to sit there and sneer at people and just tell them to go out and get a recipe... even following those requires generally a basic level of culinary knowledge (wtf is a roux, what does it mean when it says "cream the butter and sugar together" etc etc etc) and confidence that the gloopy mess you're sure you've ruined will turn out OK in the end - there is still a shortage out there of genuinely idiot-proof, novice level recpies with things like "yes this will look like a mess at this point in cooking - you HAVEN'T ruined it, don't ring the takeaway".

I never had that cooking with mother experience as a child - my mum was a single mother with a chronically ill baby, she did the best she could, but that involved making sure there was stuff in the house I could prepare for myself so I didn't go hungry - ready meals basically. She did what she had to in order to keep the house going, but with her attention focused on work and an ill baby - I pretty much had to fend for myself.

My husband on the other hand had a stay at home mum and a childhood involving him helping to prepare food and cook things (one of the earliest childhood stories they have about him is aged about 6 deciding he was going to make his own lunch and being intercepted mid-steak and chips preparation.... he was always obsessed with steak apparently). Even though I did home ec at an all-girls school (so none of this design a paper pizza or sandwich stuff), we had naff all in the way of cooking savoury MEALS because there wasn't the time in a 1 hour long lesson to do this.

You've got a generation essentially lost - while you can bring things back in schools etc (and I don't know why the hell Sure Starts etc haven't got more into basic cookery classes and the like) - it's going to take time. Blanket banning, or taxing anything that you personally think is wrong is just going to hit people without a safety net in place. You can sit and say "oh fruit and veg is cheap" - but there are people out there who genuinely don't know how to peel an onion - they're never ever going to buy one, however cheap it is.

Incidentally - I'm now the better cook in the house, but it took, bizarrely considering I generally can't stand him, that Jamie Oliver Rotherham programme to give me the kick up the backside to figure things out and work through the mandatory selection of kitchen disasters in order to go to try things out.

Sorry, but I hate hate hate culinary elitism.

Another one! Go, muggle and moony .

I don't really buy anything with much packaging, I usually buy veg that is loose.

I use Ecover to clean and just take the container back to the healthfood shop and they refill it.

Ditto the containers for flours and sugars.

hell yeah - she still works in Wick Sports Shop - JARM - you ever pop into Wick and into the sports shop and meet the order manager say hello from me

my friends brother shoots himself a couple of deer each hunting season, gets them butchered & then stocks the freezer with them. also, a foaf gets half a cow (how do you arrange that?) delivered, in big cuts (ie leg) to freeze once every six months. apparently, she only goes shopping twice a month, and she has 6 kids. they grow loads of fruit & veg, so use 'fresh' stuff from the garden in summer. in fact, i'd say nearly half the gardens round here have a veg patch in them.

actually, the majority of my shopping is done in the fruit & veg bit. i live in the states, and round here there is LESS shop space given to ready meals etc. In the equivalent of Tesco extra, there's only 3 aisles of frozen food, one of which is veg. another is ice cream, so that's a relatively small amount of ready meals. there are no refrigerated ready meals at all - people would eat out rather than use those, as eating out is so much cheaper. baking is poor - people tend to buy ready made, but i can find most of what i need at the supermarket, just go to a specialist shop occasionally for things like b.day cakes.

also, everywhere round here has farmer's markets - though some of them sell plants & cakes rather than fruit & veg, but it's easy to find.

i've yet to see a fat person running around with a gun, though i'm sure there are some of them around.

however, yes, there are obese people. so it isn't just supermarkets - i blame the fact that every time you go t someone's house, you have to be given food. if you call round for the evening, there's coffee & cake, or dips & 'chips', or something. it's just rude not to provide food for visitors. it's wonderfully social, but v bad for the waistline.

Tesco screws up farmers, strangles the supply chain, and forces companies into bulk discounts

i have to say, if it was a choice between tecos, and another, much smaller company to trade with - most supplers would go with Tescos - the worst case scenario is they pay you late and make deductions. With a smaller company, you face the possibility of them bankrupting before they pay you anything....
and FWIW the worst one for late payment /deductions is House of Fraser which suddenly enforced 90 days & 5% on all existing suppliers...(meaning that they would have had the goods 3 months before paying them taking a 5 % deduction)

I note the use of the generic 'farmers' - may of the farm conglomerates Tescos trades with are also gigantic multinationals with plenty of weight to throw around!

A company that negotiates a sensible deal with Tecos etc is on to a very profitable long term trade.

Asda has a particularly well-organised payment system for suppliers, Tesco's is now ok, Waitrose isn't bad either....(athough probs many people on here don't get how company to company trade works, the main point is : someone who pays you regularly and on time is a much better customer than one who delays but offers a higher %age profit)

Tescos, Asda, Sainsburys, M&S and Waitrose have many of the same suppliers (so the goods may come from the same factory/farm and merely have slightly different packaging and spec) - the notion that you get a product that is in some way vastly different, vastly superior or more ethically produced.....is an exaggeration. there are specific things (eg M&S using only free-rane eggs in all products) that you can point to, but it just isn't that clear cut across the board.

and i certainly find using value stuff genuinely is cheaper, and when it comes to things like butter, i'd challenge anyone to notice the difference.

'i use ocado'!! great. convenient. still a supermarket though.

Good post Emptyshell.

EnglandAllenPoe - a post from a position of knowledge, and talking lots of sense, thank you!

The only thing I can think of that goes straight in the recycling when I get home is the cardboard around the yoghurts.

But we are going to try and make our own tonight for the first time!

i always wonder why people think that getting home delivery is good for the enviornment - is it?

would love to know.

surely the people who get the stuff delivered still go to the shops sometimes to stock up on things, so they don't drastically reduce the amount of car use. plus, those refridgerated trucks use up a lot of fuel & put in quite a lot of mileage, as they don't always have a sensible route planned by lowest mileage, but by customer time slots.

then it increases the hours worked by staff at the store, who travel there, often by car (that may be an increase in hours, or an increase in the nuber of trips to work?) and, ime, they put about 2 items in each plastic bag, whereas i take my own reusable bags.

i have the same question about buying at local farms/markets - surely you need to still go to get loo roll, cleaning stuff etc, so you're actually doing more travelling than if you just go to a big supermarket.

I do wonder if supermarkets are sometimes unfairly vilified and blamed for all ills. you can tie yourself up in lnots, working out the 'best' place to shop - for health, wellbeing of the farmers, environmental factors etc., value etc.

Supposedly it is better for the environment if the stock comes from warehouses rather than just from the local store. Small display chill cabinets and freezers presumably work out more expensive and use more power (per packet of fishfingers) than big freezers that don't have to be designed to display things nicely, just keep them cold.

So if you're just getting someone else to bring things from the local store by shopping online, then you're no better off, but if you're cutting out that middle step then it may be better for the environment.

if I need top up bits of shopping I walk, a big shop I need to get a taxi back with it, (or when I was with exH and he had a car we'd either go together or he'd come and pick me up).

also I (personally) find that if I do an online shop I tend not to forget anything so easily as it's easier to cross check what you've got in your "basket" with what's in your cupboards (or not). I always end up going to the shop for top ups much less often when I've done an online shop.

I think farm shops/markets DO make a difference - if you're buying British apples rather than Spanish ones even if you then drive into town and potter around to get your non food stuff it's a lot more environmentally friendly that those Spanish apples that have been flown across to us............(IMO)

hmm, but green& i used to see the staff going round tesco & doing the shop, so that makes no difference.

good point, tocc, about local produce, but i really try to avoid flown in food anyway, so does it make a difference then?

just would genuinely like to know - we're told it's better to go to farmers etc, but wondered what the actual difference was.

i always found that farm stores shut at 5, making them completely useless to people who work. also, they all required a car to get to. so, getting a bus to/from the supermarket is actually better in those situations.

I supose it depends on where the "non flown in stuff" from the supermarket comes from - if you live in Aberdeen, and your potatoes are trucked up from Devon I suppose it's still greener to visit a few shops in your area to shop locally.
And of course it does have the advantage of helping keep local business/farmers afloat.

yes, there is that. it's just i've heard it marketed as being 'better for the environment' to a. shop locally (ie do the rounds of local farm shops etc) and b. use home delivery.

i'm just not sure about either, tbh. it prob could come down to 'case by case' e.g. your potatoes example, but what the refrigerated tesco van going back & forth all day?

as i say, it gets confusing & i'd love to know if there's any facts out there to show us one way or another.

YANBU - am a bit pushed for time so haven't read the whole thread but I think you're right. All of that over packaged over seasoned reconstitued potato starch stuff is terrible. Bad for the environment, bad for us, but as Doris Bonkers says appeals to our caveman needs of fat and salt and sugar and has a massive marketing budget behind it.

I don't eat that stuff, never walk down the aisles in face and don't have crisps/chocolate/biscuits/fizzy drinks in the house. I can't bear the Organix baby snacks that basically teach babies to eat crisps and chocolate bars. What's the point?

Had a picnic with my cousins the other day, their children ate cheese strings, ham dipper things, fruit shoots and there was so much rubbish left. What would be wrong with cubes of cheese and ham in a lunch box and a bottle of water? Makes me sound mean I know, but what is so wrong with normal food? It tastes lovely and it's much cheaper.

What with the lack of decent food and all of the computer games that they all play it makes me shudder to think how our children's generation will grow up, they'll be like the humans in Wall-e!

toccata, I know in some cases it just comes from the local store - as far as I know with Tesco it usually does. It doesn't always though - I think for Ocado it's all centralised - it's Waitrose stuff but not stuff that's already been delivered to a store and unpacked, it comes from warehouses. That's why I said it's not always better for the environment but sometimes can be.

Looking beyond food, an awful lot of packaging (like that awful rigid clamshell packaging you have to hack into with scissors) is designed for display. Then you've got shelves that are designed for display not efficiency - it's easy to see how cutting out that step (where the product has to be displayed physically to a customer walking around, catch their eye, look attractive, and so on) could save money and energy. Not all online shopping cuts that out though, partly because usually the goods are packaged in the factory as if they were going to be displayed, even if actually they never will be. I think Amazon were supposed to be doing something to have things manufactured straight into packaging suitable for posting via Amazon, to cut that sort of thing out, but I'm not sure how many things you can get like that so far - a tiny minority I'd guess.

Sorry, that was to kickassangel not toccata&etc. Scrolled up too fast on a small screen and misread.