The Commodity World in Wales

As the first industrial nation, the UK was one of the earliest countries to experience the industrialization of agriculture, a process that led to an unprecedented increase in productivity, with more and more food produced by fewer and fewer people. Early exposure to intensive food production clearly left an abiding cultural legacy; to this day, one of the proudest boasts of the British food industry is that it renders cheap food to the consuming public at ever lower prices. This production ethos was both cause and consequence of a mainstream consumption culture which sets a high premium on price and treats food more as fuel than as pleasure. In his thousandyear history of British food, Spencer (2002) caught this aesthetic perfectly when he suggested that the British ‘were unexcited by the food they ate, but they knew that they had to get on and eat the wretched stuff’. In its attachment to cheap, processed food, the UK is far closer to the US, the quintessential fast-food nation, than to Italy, France, or Spain, countries where there continues to be a strong cultural appetite for fresh, local, and seasonal food. Although Britain’s cheap-food culture has complex and manifold causes, its origins lie in the early period of industrialization, especially in the system of colonial preferences from the Commonwealth countries, which created a low-cost template for locally produced food. In other words, the global–local interplay that did so much to shape economy and society in Britain also influenced the economics of food production and the culture of food consumption. To a greater extent than in other European countries, the supermarkets have become the key players in shaping food consumption patterns in the UK. As in California, retailer power is now the key to understanding the enormous asymmetries of power that punctuate the British agri-food chain from farm to fork. One reason why supermarkets seem to wield so much more power in the UK than their analogues in other countries is that there is less countervailing power at the production end of the UK food chain.