What’s Going On In Your Local Supermarket?

Did you see Whistleblower on BBC1? Shocking!

Let me give you fair warning — what you’re about to read is pretty horrific, so if you’d rather keep visiting your local supermarket in blissful ignorance, look away now. Seriously.

If you’d rather arm yourself with the knowledge of what’s really going on behind closed doors at the supermarket giants, read on…

The BBC picked a Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s store and sent a couple of undercover journalists to work there and what they found is sending shockwaves…

The first thing you notice is how quickly and easily they’re recruited in to the fold. These chains are obviously struggling to get quality workers in and the undercover journos are recruited in double quick time, with very little training under their belt.

It’s not long before they’re spotting violation after violation — even being trained by existing staff on how to take short cuts!

Where to start with the specifics? Let’s see… how about the fresh fish counter? Looks lovely doesn’t it? All those fresh pieces of fish sitting there in ice, packed full of Omega 3 goodness? Think again… quite simply there’s no way to tell how long they’ve been sitting there.

Those pieces of fresh fish have ’sell by’ and ‘use by’ dates. Of course, there are the actual dates and then there are the made up ones. No really, I’m not kidding. In one sequence we saw how nobody at Tesco’s could identify the ‘real’ sell by dates. Not a clue. The solution? Aaah, the wonders of modern scientific methodology. Give it a sniff. If it’s not too bad, whack another few days on the sell by date.

No really. We saw it happen, thanks to the hidden cameras the undercover journos were wearing.

And guess what? The public don’t get to see the sell by dates on the fish. No, the dates face the Tesco’s staff behind the counter who can update them whenever they feel like it.

A lady in the UK sued Tesco’s after a serious bout of food poisioning — life threating food poisioning in fact — and believed the fish she bought from Tesco’s was to blame. But no, couldn’t have been — Tesco’s fish was kept at the right temperature, from fishing boat all the way to the counter at Tesco’s. How do we know? The forms say so.

Cut back to our undercover journo at Sainsbury’s and Tesco’s. Cue scenes of several days’ freezer temperatures being made up and inserted on forms. “Put in the odd high one” says one of the Tesco’s employees.

Well of course put in the odd high reading! It’s got to look realistic after all…

Then there were the jaw-dropping moments on the meat counter where the mince was coming out partly cooked (not fit for human consumption and they know it). What did they do? Sell it anyway!

What’s that? Slab of beef past it’s sell by date? Whack it through the mincer and slap a new sell by date on it. Lovely jubbly. No-one will ever know…

What else? Ah yes, then there were those wonderful, almost ‘Hollywood’ moments… Who can forget the Tesco’s employee who used the fish knife to lever the (blocked) drain cover open?

Or the diligent employee who saved Tesco precious seconds by trimming a stray fingernail with the meat scissors? Wonderful stuff! Why waste Tesco time by going to the bathroom and having to scrub up all over again, which could take both minutes and effort (God forbid)?

Ever eaten a packaged meal? Yes, so have I. First of all: Stop it! They’re bad for you at the best of times :-) We’re talking empty calorie city. Eat whole, natural foods. Do it :-)

But anyway, wait ’til you hear this… I’ll just give you the gist of it for fear of making your breakfast put in another appearance…

Factory. Packaged meals. Dirty toilets with traces of human faecal matter and urine on floor. Lazy workers who don’t change boots after going to the toilet (forget the law, not important). Bacteria from toilet on factory floor. Dirty bucket with old food dried on, sitting on factory floor. Bucket used by factory worker to pour new food in to packaged meals…

Seriously.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

How you getting on? Still with me? Not feeling too queasy I hope…

Let’s move on the scene where our journos sneak on to a farm under the cover of darkness. This is a farm producing chickens for resale at supermarkets in whatever form (whole, part of packaged meal and so-on…).

First of all, you’ve got the big chicken shed where the live chickens live. Good news! The shed is rat-proof. Well, I’d love to know how they can call it that. I’m no structural engineer but I’m pretty sure that if you have ground-level holes in a wall big enough for large rats to pass through, you can’t really call a thing rat-proof.

Particularly when you’ve got what I could only describe as a rat magnet sitting about 15 yards away from the live chicken shed…

Yes folks, it’s the dead chicken bin.

Oh yes — that close to the live ones. And it’s wide open, for all the world to see, including of course any passing vermin. Oh, and this thing is covered in white maggots. And I mean covered. Even as we watch, there are so many that they’re fighting for space with each other and dropping on to the floor.

Ok… there’s plenty more I could have mentioned but I think you get the picture.

The BBC had a food standards scientist analyse their findings and you won’t need me to tell you that he was horrified. The risk of contamination in all these examples of course, is through the roof. It’s totally unacceptable.

Now let’s be fair here. There’s a lot of people working away in our supermarkets doing everything right and being diligent about the public’s health, I’m sure.

But let’s also be realistic about what was uncovered here. It was clear that there was a culture of corner cutting and cost saving going on in very big name supermarkets. And they’re gambling with our health to eek out that extra couple of million profit on top of the billions they’re already making.

They can afford to get it right, don’t doubt that for a second. If they can’t get the staff and the staff they do have are under time pressure, they need to pay more, to get more, quality staff in. It’s important. And the management needs to make sure their employees aren’t being lazy. They can afford it — easily.

And the lack of standards isn’t just due to time-pressure and sales target pressures. No, I could forgive that to some extent. If these poor employees were just fighting a losing battle, I would have more sympathy. But there was clearly a culture of ‘couldn’t be arsed’ (one employee even used that expression) that pervaded these companies right up in to the management. That’s not forgiveable.

There’s no excuse for food standards not being met. Everything flows from good health. Health is not an area where you want to be ‘rolling the dice’. And that’s exactly what they’re doing — with your health.

What really bugs me about all this is the attitude of the supermarket giants. Let’s just stick to calling it arrogant and patronising, in the name of good taste. They couldn’t give a monkeys.

“Not representative of our stores… internal enquiries… isolated incidents…”

If you listen very careful, you can actually hear the sound of them brushing it off…

Be aware that you when you walk in to your local supermarket what you’re seeing is the glossy finish. Heaven knows what’s going on behind the scenes…

Unfortunately, we simply can’t trust big businesses like supermarkets to look after our interests.

So what’s the answer?

I talked it over with Mike this morning and he suggests sourcing your own food if you can do it. You want organic farmers and local farmers’ markets ideally, where you can get to know the people selling and where the stuff has actually come from.

Follow a healthy diet plan and then get as much of it locally as you can.

There are small scale suppliers who care about the quality and safety of food, the welfare of stock and even yes, about your health. Seek them out, stick it on your to-do list — we vote primarily with our dollars, pounds and euros.

Of course, it’s going to be more expensive — after all, we now know part of the reason why supermarkets are able to get their price so low. But of course, you can’t put a price on your health…

Thanks for listening :-)

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