Tag Archives: supermarkets

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.

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A fungus on the retail landscape

Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation, yesterday compared the big retailers to invasive species like the Nile Perch and Japanese knotweed. Honey fungus (Armillaria mellea and related species) also springs to mind, its superficially attractive fruiting bodies sprouting up prolifically while insidiously killing off surrounding plants.
Over the last few decades, the rise [...]

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