>>Joanna Blythman, author of Shopped - The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets

Nowadays, supermarkets sell a significant number of books at keen prices. But you can bet your bottom dollar that they won’t be stocking my new book. Shopped - The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets contains an unpalatable message for our large food retailers; supermarkets have become too big and too powerful and people are increasingly resentful of their looming presence in our lives.

In the US, the anti-supermarket backlash is sizeable. Wal-Mart recently lost a battle to set up in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood due to opposition from trade union, church and community groups. Posters appeared in independent shop windows reading ‘Save Our Community From Wal-Mart’.

The supermarket titan, usually found in rural and suburban areas, is now facing concerted hostility to its aggressively expansionist plans in more sophisticated urban areas.

California is proving the most difficult so far. San Diego is considering a ban on megastores. Last month, councillors in Chicago also delayed voting on a change in planning zones that would have allowed Wal-Mart to open its first complex there.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, British consumers were willing partners in a love affair with supermarkets,one turning sour as we wake up to its consequences. Our naïve bamboozlement by phoney concepts of convenience (who wants to drive every time you need a carton of milk?) and choice (Kenyan passionfruit are now more ubiquitous than English apples) has allowed a handful of big grocery chains to become multi-tasking retail monsters.

We find ourselves living in trolley towns with supermarket logos stamped all over them. Once thriving high streets have become deserts where the independent shopkeeper is an endangered species, creating yet another business opportunity for the self-same chains that emptied them in the first place. This is the new monocultural urban landscape.

Consumers have long suspected that supermarkets are mean to their suppliers. That particular cat is out the bag. I was simply stunned by the positively feudal trading relationships I found. Suppliers who lay awake at night, dreading that phone call saying: “Sorry but we’re going to delist you. Oh and we’ll want your stuff off the shelves in three days.” The growers who use more
pesticides than they would like purely to meet supermarket standards of cosmetic perfection. Buyers who bullied suppliers because they were insecure about losing their own jobs.

As an experienced food writer, I cannot help linking what is promoted on supermarket shelves with the UK’s alarming spiral of obesity. Supermarket ‘healthier eating for kids’ ranges are, for the most part, an audacious joke. What contribution do chicken kievs filled with ketchup and squirtable toffee sauce make to help children eat better?

Gondolas are stuffed with heavily processed, highly profitable, value-added ready meals and convenience foods. With their constant parroting of the cash-rich, time-poor consumer and their self-serving encouragement of the once-a-week, one-stop shop, supermarkets have provided both the means and the motive by which we have turned into a nation of hypertensive, flabby couch potatoes, eroding Britain's cooking skills and therefore food culture.

In reality, our largest supermarket chains are highly efficient machines, sensitively tuned to deliver a share price that keeps their investors happy. They jaw on about corporate social responsibility - improving the nation’s health, ethical trading, supporting local producers, and so on.

But everyone who operates within the more competitive echelons of the supermarket system is fully aware that these are optional extras that can be sidelined the minute they get in the way of delivering the necessary short-term profits.