Earlier this week I read that, from the moment of pulling into the car park to exiting it, the average supermarket shopper reads just seven words. Seven words. My initial reaction was: who are these Neanderthals? So, for want of something to talk about over supper after nearly 20 years of shackles, I ran this random fact past my husband. He was amazed anyone read as many as seven. My reaction this time was more fulsome: who is this Neanderthal, and why am I having dinner with him?
When I was home from boarding school, I was positively relieved when she reached for an M&S carbonara rather than Delia
These seven words are all the more stark when you know the average length of time spent in a supermarket: 37 mins. I’m no mathematician, but according to some lightning calculations, that’s fewer than one word every five minutes. And that’s just the average; this must mean there are thousands of dribbling knuckle-draggers out there aimlessly wandering the aisles of Britain’s supermarkets and reading significantly fewer or even no words at all. The sort without any inclination to check the provenance or the fat content or the ingredients of whatever they’re dropping in their trolley. Mothers dashing home after a long day at work and desperate to put the children to bed, picking up oat milk instead of almond. Hungover husbands dispatched on Saturday mornings to do a weekly shop, and unable to distinguish their quinoa from their amaranth by sight.
At the same time, the average being seven words suggests that there are some literary types who feel they can process more raw data while navigating their way around the Cooks’ Ingredients section of Waitrose and have robust views on which stock cubes are best. But even if they’re reading more than seven words, there’s no guarantee that they can avoid the sort of marital discord that can arise from confusing dried porcini and shiitake mushrooms.
No, these people would be far better placed to plump for a ready meal. Because after a long day doing something tedious and soulless in finance, who among us can be bothered to cook something from scratch? I mean, I do, but then I don’t work in finance, I’m essentially a cross between Diana Henry and Bella Hadid, and I’m married to someone who might not be able to read but is enormously fussy about his food.
Despite the Neanderthal’s protests, I’m all in favour of corner cutting. Middle-class types can probably kid themselves that they’ve almost cooked when they wrap their Charlie Bigham supper in the foil before putting it in the oven. Our daily lives are stressful enough without feeling we have to throw kale and joyless meat substitutes into the logistical Magimix. Why should we be pressured into buying virtuous foods we’re too tired to prepare and don’t feel like eating? To misquote Voltaire (who probably didn’t say this about free speech in the first place), I wouldn’t touch the stuff you want to bung in your microwave but I’ll defend to the heart disease-related death your right to do so. This is partly out of (rare) loyalty to my mother, who’s a frightful cook, and who regarded the advent of ready meals as a gift from the domestic gods. When I was home from boarding school, I was positively relieved when she reached for an M&S carbonara rather than Delia.
Supermarkets know all of this, and rightly, as enterprises with shareholders, play it to their advantage. In the same article which shattered my world view about the intelligence of my fellow man, James Bailey, the executive director of Waitrose, bristled against the idea that he is force-feeding consumers an unhealthy diet of ready meals and sugar fixes as part of a sinister plot. Supermarkets are commercial creatures, he told the Oxford Literary Festival, and will be guided almost immediately by consumer choice. If consumers started to buy more environmentally sustainable, healthy products that supported change in the food system – trust them, they would be putting those products on the shelves in greater numbers.
So those seven words would have to do a great deal of heavy lifting to change consumer tastes. And I can’t help but wonder what on earth those words would need to be to do so. I can’t think of any number of words that would convince my mother and great swathes of people up and down the country to divert themselves towards the lentils and tofu when there’s coq au vin ready to microwave.
In defence of ready meals
14
1
22.03.2024
Earlier this week I read that, from the moment of pulling into the car park to exiting it, the average supermarket shopper reads just seven words. Seven words. My initial reaction was: who are these Neanderthals? So, for want of something to talk about over supper after nearly 20 years of shackles, I ran this random fact past my husband. He was amazed anyone read as many as seven. My reaction this time was more fulsome: who is this Neanderthal, and why am I having dinner with him?
When I was home from boarding school, I was positively relieved when she reached for an M&S carbonara rather than Delia
These seven words are all the more stark when you know the average length of time spent in a supermarket: 37 mins. I’m no mathematician, but according to some lightning calculations, that’s fewer than one word every five minutes. And that’s just the average; this must mean there are thousands of dribbling knuckle-draggers out there aimlessly wandering the aisles of Britain’s supermarkets and reading significantly fewer or even no words at all. The sort without any inclination to check........
© The Spectator
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