Mar 29 2007
Books, eggs and the illusion of provenance
Philip Pullman once wrote that books are not eggs, his point being that every book is different whereas we expect every egg we buy to be the same. Agreed, books should not be treated as a commodity, but nor should eggs. Every egg is an individual creation, laid by a hen of some particular variety, fed and kept in a particular way, in a particular location.
I was reminded of this comparison of books and eggs, and the telling assumptions implicit, on a recent rare visit to my local Tesco (looking at the labelling of their meat, on which more later). Many of the packs of meat carried photos of genial looking farmers surrounded by apparently happy animals in beautiful countryside. All very well, and I’m sure these pictured farmers are doing an excellent job, tending their livestock and the countryside, and producing good food.
But how much of Tesco’s meat comes from these pictured farmers? This is an illusion of provenance. Returning to the comparison with books, it’s rather as though a bookshop sold all its books under Jane Austen’s name, simply because she wrote some of them. We deserve to be told more about how our food’s produced and where it’s from.
In the opening paragraph of the Books are not Eggs piece, Philip Pullman unwittingly sets out much that is wrong with our food system:
Every week we go to the supermarket and buy a dozen eggs. We expect them to taste and look pretty well the same as last week’s lot. And we know that neither the hen who laid them, nor the farmer who collected them, had anything to do with deciding what price we should pay at the checkout, because that’s the job of the retailer; and we know that the price will have been worked out by balancing such things as the deal the farmer had to accept, the price the customer is likely to put up with, the wages of the shelf-stackers, and so on. Buying eggs is a transaction that takes place so often that we can tell at once if the price this week is twice what it was last week, or how much less the supermarket charges than the corner shop.
Note the assumption that eggs are cheaper in the supermarket. How happy this must have made the supermarkets, who spend millions of pounds persuading us that they’re cheapest. In truth, eggs, like potatoes, are often significantly cheaper in independent shops.
