The name can’t help but invite mockery. When Sainsbury’s launched its ‘Taste the Difference’ range 25 years ago this autumn, I wasn’t alone in noting that the phrase almost begged for a question mark at the end.
But the British public are (mostly) more concerned with dinner than with sarcasm. The Taste the Difference range now extends to more than 1,200 products, from Pugliese Burrata with Sunsoaked (sic) Tomatoes and Bacon Wrapped Halloumi Sticks with Hot Honey Drizzle to Anya Potatoes and Nocellara Del Belice Olives.
I admit to having eaten most of the above products, despite being a keen ‘cook from scratch’ sort who loves to ramble around Electric Avenue in Brixton to buy fish, veg and lamb chops. (Only in Britain is the market shop considered to be an eccentric and/or pretentious way to buy food.)
Yet when I succumb to Sainsbury’s and the odd Taste the Difference ‘treat’, I find most of what I eat isn’t bad at all – though, like so much of the non-premium food Sainsbury’s sells, there seems to be an endemic caution towards imbuing anything with levels of spice or flavour that could intimidate the more gastronomically pusillanimous inhabitants of middle England.
In short, Sainsbury’s knows its market. And although it may not have been the first supermarket to launch a ‘premium’ line of foods (Tesco introduced its ‘Finest’ range two years earlier, in 1998), it is Taste the Difference that has, more than any other range of goods, prompted the current state of affairs for the British shopper – whereby we can shop for beans in the same way we buy seats on a long-haul flight. From Lidl to Waitrose, it’s now possible, in the larger branches at least, to choose from an ‘essentials’ or ‘value’ tin of baked beans (economy class passengers), a ‘standard’ tin of beans (economy plus) or a ‘deluxe’ tin (first-class beans).
French supermarkets have no truck with the class-based shopping basket. Wander around a branch of Carrefour and the priority when it comes to labelling is to show the local designation of cheeses, wines and olive oils. On the continent, the onus is on where the food is from, not what it says about your class aspirations. So what is it about us Brits that makes us tolerate, and mostly embrace, the construct of the class-stratified supermarket shop? In short: rationing.
By any reasonable historic measure, we’re still living in a post-war society. And the generation who spent so many, many years subsisting on Woolton pie, powdered eggs and minuscule, coupon-issued amounts of cheese, meat and sugar each week are still with us in their tens of thousands. By the time rationing ended in July 1954, we’d spent a long time being hungry and, quite naturally, we pigged out, caring not one jot for the quality of what we ate. I still remember my late Granny telling me how much she enjoyed buying Fray Bentos tinned pies three at a time. For her, having this amount of meat and pastry in the house was a luxury, and she continued buying them until her death in 2001.
It’s far from unusual to see people packing Lidl cremant into Waitrose bags for life – as if to say: ‘Well, that’s where we normally shop’
The strain of both demanding vast amounts of food and wanting it to be as cheap as possible (the price of a typical weekly food shop in the UK is still noticeably lower than other western European nations) had to show among the burgeoning middle classes at some point. Taste the Difference was the most successful response to the disconnect between the post-war aspirational demands of the middle-middles and the ‘cheap as chips’ demands of the majority of consumers.
And so we have the present scenario; one that is far more nuanced than the notion that ‘posh people’ go to M&S and Waitrose while poorer people go to Lidl or Asda. Not a bit of it. You don’t even have to leave my local branch of Lidl in Stockwell to see class-based shopping in action. Its ‘Deluxe’ range of foods are often excellent and it’s far from unusual to see people packing Lidl’s very good cremant into Waitrose bags for life – as if to say: ‘Well, that’s where we normally shop, but we did read about this curious German supermarket in the Guardian and we don’t want to be seen as snobs.’
But am I alone in wishing that this kind of class-signalling wasn’t so prevalent on our shelves and in our cupboards and fridges? Sainsbury’s and its rivals have proved themselves highly adept at finding profit in our class anxieties, knowing that industrial manufacturing techniques can be easily disguised and morally assuaged by wrapping the resulting fish pie in glossier cardboard with a more mouth-watering photo.
The supermarkets would like us to believe that we’re living in an era of emancipated opulence, where everyone can ‘spoil themselves’ with a gourmet lasagne on top of the bog-standard milk, eggs and bananas. As M&S might say, if a truth serum was poured over their adverts: ‘This isn’t just a class system, it’s a British class system – drizzled with insecurity, layered with picayune snobbery and topped off with fake artisan packaging; ideal for a Saturday night in spent never having to question the ethics and provenance of industrialised food too closely.’
It doesn’t sound tempting to me. But, looking in my fridge, my possession of a Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference chocolate and salted caramel tart tells its own story. I’m as guilty as anyone of perpetuating the current state of affairs. My rebellion against the status quo will, sadly, probably extend no further than simply refusing to buy first-class baked beans. Of such acts, revolutions are really not made.
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