To hell in a shopping basket

May 3, 2008


Grocery grief, checkout angst, shopping horrors: the weekly shop is becoming an increasingly distressing experience as prices continue skywards. Geoff Collett looks at what's going on - and what might be done about it. --------------------
Right then: who can we blame for that heart attack-inducing experience which has become the conclusion to the supermarket shop? The bit where the nice young person at the checkout announces the stratospheric sum to hand over?
Not I, says the farmer.
"The farmer's proportion of the retail price is significantly smaller than anyone would believe, and it's a lot less than half, " says Federated Farmers president Charlie Pedersen.
Not I, says the vegetable grower.
"People think growers are getting rich when the prices are high, but it's not necessarily the case, " says Peter Silcock, the chief executive of Horticulture New Zealand.
Not I, says the poultry man.
"We're as efficient as we can be, " says Michael Brooks from the Poultry Industry Association.
Not I, says the supermarket manager.
"Our suppliers increase their prices to us and we pass that on, " says Alan Malcolmson, the general manager of retail for the Foodstuffs South Island chain.
No, it may not be them, but the butcher, the baker, the grocer and all the rest of them point the finger more or less in the same direction - to the world beyond and the rather astonishing alignment of global forces impacting on household grocery bills (the popular commentator-speak is of a "perfect storm").
There has been the weather, such as drought in Waikato and Australia; soaring fuel costs; George W. Bush's enthusiasm for home-grown biofuels, which has diverted much of his country's awesome agronomic potential into growing petrol substitute rather than human and animal feed; shadowy speculators banking on and feeding off commodity booms; rice stockpiling in Asia; the surging middle- classes of China and India, as the once- impoverished discover the pleasures and possibilities of disposable income. And on it goes.
So if you want a scapegoat, rage against the world, the machine, capitalism, the dying of the light, whatever you like. Just remember, it's bigger than any of us.
Or is it?
Sophie Gray has probably more sensible advice. Blaming will get you only so far - as in nowhere - in this game, says the woman behind the Destitute Gourmet project.
"People love to blame . . . but at the end of the day, the only person who can be responsible for what goes in your trolley and how much you spend is you."
Auckland-based Gray has become a bit of a media darling lately, for her cottage-industry approach to homespun home economics. After years of fighting rampant food snobbery and consumer complacency, her cookbooks, website and soundbites of smart advice are suddenly fashionable.
She has plenty to say on the subject: indeed, she's already working on her fifth book (due for publication before Christmas).
"We need to be thinking about what we put on our plates and what we put in our trolleys, and whether we really need the ice-cream and the chocolate biscuits and the bottles of wine and the imported products, " Gray says.
"And do we really need our yoghurt in individual servings? Do we really need potato crisps in the lunchbox when there are only 11 crisps in the packet? Do we really need to buy squeezy fruit in a completely unsustainable plastic tube, or cannot we just pick an apple off a tree or buy them for 99c a kilo in the fruit-and-veg shop?
"Those are choices that people are making in the supermarket every day. They're choosing to buy stuff that didn't even exist 20 years ago."
But even Gray's world of "smart choices" and going without sounds slightly hollow in the hard-scrabble streets of state-house Stoke, and it's unlikely the Destitute Gourmet could tell Natashka Wright anything new.
Wright is a long-time volunteer at Karaka St's House 44, a community house in the true sense - a place where neighbours roll up for help, support, advice, counselling, company, something to do, a yarn.
School holidays mean a small tribe of local children charge about. Wright is in the kitchen chopping up a donated pumpkin for soup. The flour's out for a batch of muffins.
The kids will wolf it all down for lunch. Probably it's a lot more than they'd normally hope for.
Karaka St could be considered a frontline in the onslaught of spiralling grocery bills, but Wright isn't exactly crying into her soup about things. A no-nonsense sort and a single mother of two (she lives with her two-year-old son; her older boy has more or less left home), she credits her mum, Sharon, for teaching her the budgeting and housekeeping skills that mean she can confidently pronounce: "I still think food's fairly cheap, because I can budget."
She can also tell you without blinking any number of bargains at various Nelson butcheries, grocers and supermarkets - toilet paper $1.79 for four rolls of three-ply, four cans of Watties spaghetti for $5, $1.99 for a big bag of cornflakes or rice bubbles, etc.
She knows where to go when she wants to cook up a feed of neck chops for visitors. She knows who sells the cheap bulk-bags of frozen broccoli for a few dollars per kilo when the fresh stuff is selling at $1.50 a head.
She knows that when the milk runs out, it may be cheaper to go to the service station to pick up a $4 bread-and-milk combo, rather than spending well over $2 at the dairy for the milk alone.
She has useful contacts too. Friends who work for fish processors, who can pick up a big bag of frozen crumbed fish portions for a fraction of the cost in supermarkets; a man who can source the day's unsold bread from supermarket bakeries, which the rule-makers decree is only fit for pig food but as far as Wright is concerned is still perfectly good food.
She takes great pride in her ability to manage on a tight budget even at a time like this, and gets into a lively discussion with a visitor to the house over the quality of supermarket no-name housebrands - she's a convert, he's unimpressed.
He also complains that the cheap $1 loaves of bread offered by some bakeries don't last like more expensive name-brands. Shopping at the bottom end of the market can suck.
If the low-income and the downright poor are the obviously most vulnerable at a time of soaring prices, the risk is double-edged.
Winsome Parnell, an associate professor in the Department of Human Nutrition at the University of Otago, says various research has found that - as complex as people's various grocery shopping choices are to read - when money is tight, perishable food is one of the first things to go, probably meaning fresh fruit and veges.
'If you've got hungry children, you're not thinking of fine-tuning vitamins and minerals, you're thinking of filling their tummies.
"What mothers who are not well-off will tell you is, 'I know the theory. Don't go and tell me to learn nutrition, I know what I should do - I just can't do it.' And that's heart-breaking and true."
But as almost anyone will enthusiastically attest, grocery grief is no longer the preserve of life's perennial strugglers. What's vaulted it out of the foodbanks and on to the front pages is that it has become the lot of the usually comfortable middle classes, already exasperated by mortgage misery and petrol pain. Websites and budget-living classes are on the rise. Behaviour that a year ago might have been dismissed as eccentric, fringe or stingy - making your own household cleaners, recycling second-hand bits into presents for friends, taking home baking for the office shout - is edging into the mainstream.
Even coming from a determinedly frugal background - she blames her Dutch background - Nelson woman Marina Willis teases herself about the lengths she is now going to cut back, since attending a sustainable living course and joining the Simple Savings website (www.simplesavings .co.nz).
Chopping back on the grocery bill is only part of her determination to reduce her, her husband's and son's combined cost of living - she's even started cutting her own hair. But the pride is unmistakable when she can announce that she's already got the week's grocery bill down to $111 ($84 at Pak'N Save, $27 at Raeward), including five meat meals.
Her frugality drive isn't joyless - one goal has been to ensure that the family still has a regular takeaway treat, if not as frequently as it once did. But she has some advice of her own for those times when exhaustion takes hold and dinner seems too hard: "Baked beans on toast is still feeding your family when you're tired."
Sophie Gray has almost a decade of living her own brand as a destitute gourmet, going back to the time when she and her family had just $50 to pay for the groceries. As a sort of guru, she has attracted an international reputation - the Destitute Gourmet website (www.destitutegourmet.com) attracts 350,000 hits a year, many from overseas.
Gray is mostly sympathetic to the anxiety grocery prices are fuelling, but suggests that some chickens are arriving home. Years of stable, low food prices have made people complacent. Simple lessons that were basic commonsense in any household up until the 1980s - use and stick to shopping lists, plan meals in advance so as to only buy what is needed, learn how to stretch smaller quantities of meat, know how to prepare the building-blocks of homemade fare (whether scone dough or white sauce) - have vanished.
But Gray knows there are good reasons for the demise of home economics as a known science.
Right then: who can we blame for that heart attack-inducing experience which has become the conclusion to the supermarket shop? The bit where the nice young person at the checkout announces the stratospheric sum to hand over?
Not I, says the farmer.
"The farmer's proportion of the retail price is significantly smaller than anyone would believe, and it's a lot less than half, " says Federated Farmers president Charlie Pedersen.
Not I, says the vegetable grower.
"People think growers are getting rich when the prices are high, but it's not necessarily the case, " says Peter Silcock, the chief executive of Horticulture New Zealand.
Not I, says the poultry man.
"We're as efficient as we can be, " says Michael Brooks from the Poultry Industry Association.
Not I, says the supermarket manager.
"Our suppliers increase their prices to us and we pass that on, " says Alan Malcolmson, the general manager of retail for the Foodstuffs South Island chain.
No, it may not be them, but the butcher, the baker, the grocer and all the rest of them point the finger more or less in the same direction - to the world beyond and the rather astonishing alignment of global forces impacting on household grocery bills (the popular commentator-speak is of a "perfect storm").
There has been the weather, such as drought in Waikato and Australia; soaring fuel costs; George W. Bush's enthusiasm for home-grown biofuels, which has diverted much of his country's awesome agronomic potential into growing petrol substitute rather than human and animal feed; shadowy speculators banking on and feeding off commodity booms; rice stockpiling in Asia; the surging middle- classes of China and India, as the once- impoverished discover the pleasures and possibilities of disposable income. And on it goes.
So if you want a scapegoat, rage against the world, the machine, capitalism, the dying of the light, whatever you like. Just remember, it's bigger than any of us.
Or is it?
Sophie Gray has probably more sensible advice. Blaming will get you only so far - as in nowhere - in this game, says the woman behind the Destitute Gourmet project.
"People love to blame . . . but at the end of the day, the only person who can be responsible for what goes in your trolley and how much you spend is you."
Auckland-based Gray has become a bit of a media darling lately, for her cottage-industry approach to homespun home economics. After years of fighting rampant food snobbery and consumer complacency, her cookbooks, website and soundbites of smart advice are suddenly fashionable.
She has plenty to say on the subject: indeed, she's already working on her fifth book (due for publication before Christmas).
"We need to be thinking about what we put on our plates and what we put in our trolleys, and whether we really need the ice-cream and the chocolate biscuits and the bottles of wine and the imported products, " Gray says.
"And do we really need our yoghurt in individual servings? Do we really need potato crisps in the lunchbox when there are only 11 crisps in the packet? Do we really need to buy squeezy fruit in a completely unsustainable plastic tube, or cannot we just pick an apple off a tree or buy them for 99c a kilo in the fruit-and-veg shop?
"Those are choices that people are making in the supermarket every day. They're choosing to buy stuff that didn't even exist 20 years ago."
But even Gray's world of "smart choices" and going without sounds slightly hollow in the hard-scrabble streets of state-house Stoke, and it's unlikely the Destitute Gourmet could tell Natashka Wright anything new.
Wright is a long-time volunteer at Karaka St's House 44, a community house in the true sense - a place where neighbours roll up for help, support, advice, counselling, company, something to do, a yarn.
School holidays mean a small tribe of local children charge about. Wright is in the kitchen chopping up a donated pumpkin for soup. The flour's out for a batch of muffins.
The kids will wolf it all down for lunch. Probably it's a lot more than they'd normally hope for.
Karaka St could be considered a frontline in the onslaught of spiralling grocery bills, but Wright isn't exactly crying into her soup about things. A no-nonsense sort and a single mother of two (she lives with her two-year-old son; her older boy has more or less left home), she credits her mum, Sharon, for teaching her the budgeting and housekeeping skills that mean she can confidently pronounce: "I still think food's fairly cheap, because I can budget."
She can also tell you without blinking any number of bargains at various Nelson butcheries, grocers and supermarkets - toilet paper $1.79 for four rolls of three-ply, four cans of Watties spaghetti for $5, $1.99 for a big bag of cornflakes or rice bubbles, etc.
She knows where to go when she wants to cook up a feed of neck chops for visitors. She knows who sells the cheap bulk-bags of frozen broccoli for a few dollars per kilo when the fresh stuff is selling at $1.50 a head.
She knows that when the milk runs out, it may be cheaper to go to the service station to pick up a $4 bread-and-milk combo, rather than spending well over $2 at the dairy for the milk alone.
She has useful contacts too. Friends who work for fish processors, who can pick up a big bag of frozen crumbed fish portions for a fraction of the cost in supermarkets; a man who can source the day's unsold bread from supermarket bakeries, which the rule-makers decree is only fit for pig food but as far as Wright is concerned is still perfectly good food.
She takes great pride in her ability to manage on a tight budget even at a time like this, and gets into a lively discussion with a visitor to the house over the quality of supermarket no-name housebrands - she's a convert, he's unimpressed.
He also complains that the cheap $1 loaves of bread offered by some bakeries don't last like more expensive name-brands. Shopping at the bottom end of the market can suck.
If the low-income and the downright poor are the obviously most vulnerable at a time of soaring prices, the risk is double-edged.
Winsome Parnell, an associate professor in the Department of Human Nutrition at the University of Otago, says various research has found that - as complex as people's various grocery shopping choices are to read - when money is tight, perishable food is one of the first things to go, probably meaning fresh fruit and veges.
'If you've got hungry children, you're not thinking of fine-tuning vitamins and minerals, you're thinking of filling their tummies.
"What mothers who are not well-off will tell you is, 'I know the theory. Don't go and tell me to learn nutrition, I know what I should do - I just can't do it.' And that's heart-breaking and true."
But as almost anyone will enthusiastically attest, grocery grief is no longer the preserve of life's perennial strugglers. What's vaulted it out of the foodbanks and on to the front pages is that it has become the lot of the usually comfortable middle classes, already exasperated by mortgage misery and petrol pain. Websites and budget-living classes are on the rise. Behaviour that a year ago might have been dismissed as eccentric, fringe or stingy - making your own household cleaners, recycling second-hand bits into presents for friends, taking home baking for the office shout - is edging into the mainstream.
Even coming from a determinedly frugal background - she blames her Dutch background - Nelson woman Marina Willis teases herself about the lengths she is now going to cut back, since attending a sustainable living course and joining the Simple Savings website (www.simplesavings .co.nz).
Chopping back on the grocery bill is only part of her determination to reduce her, her husband's and son's combined cost of living - she's even started cutting her own hair. But the pride is unmistakable when she can announce that she's already got the week's grocery bill down to $111 ($84 at Pak'N Save, $27 at Raeward), including five meat meals.
Her frugality drive isn't joyless - one goal has been to ensure that the family still has a regular takeaway treat, if not as frequently as it once did. But she has some advice of her own for those times when exhaustion takes hold and dinner seems too hard: "Baked beans on toast is still feeding your family when you're tired."
Sophie Gray has almost a decade of living her own brand as a destitute gourmet, going back to the time when she and her family had just $50 to pay for the groceries. As a sort of guru, she has attracted an international reputation - the Destitute Gourmet website (www.destitutegourmet.com) attracts 350,000 hits a year, many from overseas.
Gray is mostly sympathetic to the anxiety grocery prices are fuelling, but suggests that some chickens are arriving home. Years of stable, low food prices have made people complacent. Simple lessons that were basic commonsense in any household up until the 1980s - use and stick to shopping lists, plan meals in advance so as to only buy what is needed, learn how to stretch smaller quantities of meat, know how to prepare the building-blocks of homemade fare (whether scone dough or white sauce) - have vanished.
But Gray knows there are good reasons for the demise of home economics as a known science.
The forces telling us it's all too hard and unnecessary have been formidable.
"There are billions of dollars invested in telling people that they need to buy convenience products because they haven't got the time, or the skill, or the energy at the end of the day to make something for themselves. Which actually for a lot of people is a nonsense, but they've been told it for so long that they believe it."
Food fashion has plenty to answer for too.
"We have elaborate cooking shows on TV and we have top-end cookery books that almost make cooking seem like an artisan craft rather than an essential life-skill. So it becomes unattainable."
And shoppers become undiscerning. Gray is astonished at how blithely people grocery shop, often spending hundreds of dollars in a single supermarket trip with hardly a second thought. Considering the lengths and agonising most go to before spending $100 on, say, clothes or a small gadget, it is bizarre how casually we regard our groceries.
"A previous generation could sort what they really needed, and if they could afford a little bit extra of something, that was a treat. We tend to just go around the supermarket putting things in the trolley without making serious decisions about it, then we're rattled by how much it's costing."
She sees signs of change - revolt, even. She is frequently in the supermarket, whether for shopping or research, and always talks to other shoppers.
"I've never seen people so angry - particularly in the dairy aisle ... People are angry that we can't afford to buy our own butter and cheese and milk." In one way, she is heartened. At least it might force them to start waking up to some home truths. Nelson Mail