Summer’s Supermarket Secrets

‘I’ve been in the food industry all my life,’ booms Gregg Wallace as, Gulliver-like, he begins his tour through the whole island of Great Britain via its supermarkets. During his peregrinations, he finds the orange supermarket developing a new strawberry and some Spanish ready meals, one of the posh green supermarkets trying to change our barbecuing habits and the supermarket with a hyphen in its name pumping ripening gas into a banana warehouse.

Why all this Daniel Defoe nonsense? Because the revelations here are not the dirty secrets of the food industry, but that the industry itself is a self-constructing giant, beneath whose feet we could all easily be crushed. We knew this, of course, but it needs the human scale (and is there anyone more humanly scaled than Gregg Wallace?) to throw it into relief. ‘I’ve been in the food industry…’ Yes, yes: you said.