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.

Or, another way of looking at it.

If I don't want to be fat, then I know what to do, pretty much. If I then blame the supermarkets, then that's a bit of a cop out really.

If I don't want somebody else to be fat, though, then it would probably pay to be interested in ALL the things that might affect that - their good or bad personal willpower AND their environment.

If I've got a really strong reason (like running a national health service, say) not to want all these somebody elses to be fat, then I might want to tweak some of the environmental things. Maybe supermarkets, maybe something else.

But saying that it's their fault and they should take personal responsibility doesn't help solve my problem at all. It might be right - it might be a reason why they have no right to complain about being fat or blame other people - it just doesn't solve my problem of lots of obesity in society.

How the smeg did this turn into an anti-fattie thread

I believe in personal responsibility and it's my responsibility to avoid supermarkets.

However there are a gazillion seductive techniques to make you buy this shite and for the poverty stricken it's extremely difficult to feed your family healthily when you can pick up a packet of 14 bags of crisps for £1.

It is cheap, easy to produce and it is killing us.

This is where the free market has seriously fucked us.

Long hours culture, low wages, cheap, sugary easily available foods - oh yeah personal responsibility is the answer for everything

Yeah, if you're just not clever enough to understand the food labels then tough titty

I think that a lot of it is to do with product placement and cost. I am a healthy eater and rarley buy anything processed- however- the crap food always appears so cheap and is always on offer. It is easy to see why so many people buy it.

When I was in uni I ate crap- I was in various sports teams so could get away with it but I had to learn how to cook when I graduated. My mum worked long hours when I was growing up so I didn't get to learn home cooking (until I discovered delia) Personally I think home echonomics should be an essential subject in schools- to tackle this problem with education

Personally I find that if I make stuff myself it ends up cheaper and tastes nicer.

Surely supermarkets - indeed all shops - DO demonstrate "moral and ethical qualms about what they put on their shelves". They don't sell foods that are dangerous or illegal and remove those which are found to be a health hazard.

Beyond that what is "immoral" or "unethical" about having more bottles of Coke than mineral water on display? I know which one contains more sugar and which one, if drunk to excess, is worse for my health. But only I can make the choice to consume one or both.

And as lamplighter points out, such shops sell plenty of 'healthy' food too.

I agree. Not everybody has the time, resources and education to read food labels, buy fresh organic ingredients and prepare healthy meals at home. There's a reason why obesity is linked to socio-economic status.

I'm with you, OP. And I do make my own cake!

Food doesn't need to be healthy to be organic - plenty of quick meals here start from a tin - fry up onion, carrots bit of other vewg - add tin of tomatoes - cost if you buy the basics type range in most supermarkets probably less than £1 so around the same cost as a jar of sauce (yes there are cheapo suaces too) - so with a bit of effort you can do it and it doesn't take much time. So yes, personal responsibility is key - otherwise what is the answer - 'Big Brother' decides what I can and can't eat?

I grew up in a household where we didn't have crisps, cakes, biscuits, coke etc. I used to be flabbergasted at friend's houses where they would open a cupboard after school and help themsleves to stacks of the stuff.

I am so glad I did grow up with a careful mum - I never developed a junk food habit - it does not occur to me to buy this stuff because I have never craved it. Sod the theory that if you deny a child these things they will gorge themselves when they are older.

My friend gives her (overweight) 7 year DS a Mars Bar EVERY day after school and buys all the crap from the supermarket aisles, including THREE cheesecakes every week "because it is our treat".

Next time you are in the supermarket - look at what it is you NEED, not want. You could find yourself ignoring 75% of the store.

I am not saying we all dine on potatoes and beans but show a little self restraint on one or two items for the first week and then three or four the next week and see if you miss the stuff.

The higher up the list of ingredients an item appears means it is the principle ingredient in that foodstuff. When sugar is second or third on the list - put it back.

Supermarkets are there to flog us stuff - fight back

I don't agree with supermarkets selling alcohol. I think it should only be allowed to be sold in off licences, pubs and restaurants.

That way you have to make a special trip to go and buy it and it would be easier to keep tabs on not selling to under 18s.

The vast amount of cheap alcohol that is sold in supermarkets has become part of a weekly shop, which it shouldn't imo.

I don't agree with supermarkets selling alcohol. I think it should only be allowed to be sold in off licences, pubs and restaurants.

That way you have to make a special trip to go and buy it and it would be easier to keep tabs on not selling to under 18s.

The vast amount of cheap alcohol that is sold in supermarkets has become part of a weekly shop, which it shouldn't imo.

ahh you're my hero greenandsilverstars

noyoucant: actually i take issue with mineral water too, it's absolutely hideous for the environment and it is ridiculous to sell us something supposedly healthful that we can already get FOR FREE! utter madness.

i think you're putting too much trust into supermarmets. they will remove something harmful if the voice of opposition becomes louder and more economically damaging than the money to be gained from continuing to sell it. whichever way you look at it, that is NOT moral. pure self interest.

actually, i suppose that shouodnt say for free since it isnt, should say "which is pumped into our homes through a tap and which we can partake of whenever we feel like it."

A lot of it is because loads of people don' know how to cook simple things like cakes, biscuits, mash, etc. So they have to buy them.

I agree with the thread, but I do feel [sad when i see people buying ready-meals because they honestly wouldn't know how to cook a meal.

I work with vulnerable adults, many of whom have learning difficulties and the vast majority of whom are also parents. And it would really take your breath away at how little a lot of them know about nutrition, cooking, food hygiene, meal planning, budgeting and how to shop.

There is a new scheme being launched by the NHS to train community workers and people who work in adult education to train the adults and young people they work with in these basic skills and the results are often brilliant.

However, this NHS scheme only manages to reach a very small proportion of adults in this situation. So they are effectively in the position where they spend their weeks benefits on foods they think are going to fill their kids up - frozen oven chips, pizzas, crisps, biscuits, processed white bread, cheap eggs laid by battery hens, anything that is on offer and stretches their money a bit further.

It's one thing to say we all have free choice and no one forces us to buy anything but when Tesco sell multipacks of crisps and sacks of oven chips half price then this is often the result. And, believe it or not, there are hundreds of thousands of families in exactly this situation, all across the UK.

Big, private companies do have an ethical responsibility to the consumer base they are profiting from. Plastic bags are another issue - of course, you can bring your own bags with you but a lot of people don't and as a result our landfills are full of plastic bags courtesy of Asda/Tesco/Sainsburys/wherever that aren't biodegrading any time soon. But since no one forced us to use the bags, then the destruction of the natural environment isn't a problem? Yeah and banks can do whatever they want with taxpayers money and BP can pump oil into the sea - as long as they're making a profit, everything's cool...

but the water here is rank sally - it's hard and tastes foul.......now some nice soft water like they have in Edinburgh or somewhere - fab, but not this water - yuck.

lamplighter - my mum never bought cakes and biscuits EVER..............but she used to bake every single day

I disagree that it's hard to feed children healthy food for less than junk. Buying junk is much more expensive.

Toccatanfudge

My mum could burn water

So you don't pay water rates??

Again it's a choice do I pay money for a bottle of water knowing it's shipped around the country or switch the tap on.

The suppliers / supermarkets do try to convince us to buy their product but do we really need warning lables on everything and not able to make reasonably informed decisions?

The law should be there to make sure any claims are valid and proven but that's as far as they go. Water companies do put in their details how much say a litre of their good clean water is vs a bottle.

Stuff like alcohol should not be allowed to be sold below the cost price. But I want the choice to buy what I want from them or ignore it and go elsewhere.

actually I used to go back to boarding school armed with bags of cakes that my mum had made

yes littlemisssnowshine!

your story made me feel very

you know battery eggs aren't very ethical - but I'd sooner spend money on those for scrambled eggs on toast, or other basic meal that use eggs than by junk

After living in Switzerland in Germany, I always find it truly astonishing to come back and look round a british supermarket. And appalling and depressing. It is unbelievable.

I know they are a businesses with the sole goal of making profit. People talk on here of personal responsibility, but it isn't that simple, and supermarkets should be forced to take some responsibility for this. Obesity is a huge and rapidly increasing problem and the supermarkets (but also the ready availability of junk/snack/fast food in the UK is a big part of the problem. Seriously, crap is so widely available in UK, much more so than I am used to here, I guess it would become or feel the norm and people would eat much more.

No idea what the solution is, but for sure the amount of crap 'food' available in supermarkets, town centers, schools, eally everywhere you turn is astonishing.

And I'm not saying that just to get up on a soapbox and make people feel crap about buying the occasional box of magnums - it's just a fact about our society today and I don't really think it's an adequate response to say if people can't understand what it says on food labels then that's their own fault.

The statistics about adult literacy in the UK alone are appalling - people literally can't read the packets. And then those that can read them have no idea that pizzas, crisps etc are really all that bad for them. Especially in a supermarket that also sells fags, booze etc.

YABU, low fat mayo is vile. buy the good stuff!

YABU

Supermarkets don't have responsibility for what consumers choose to buy.

Consumers have that responsibility themselves.*

There is plenty of information about healthy eating available if you choose to look.

Some people just don't choose to look.

*(I'd make an exception for people with learning difficulties as LittleMissSnow mentions).

LittleMiss I see your point about adult literacy and inability to read the packets.

But surely the solution is to improve education - not to ban supermarkets from selling unhealthy food?

In other words target the problem not the symptom, iyswim.