Are we living in an age of fast fruit and veg?

Fast fashion – the business model that dominates our high streets – relies on a simple premise: selling more for less, with a ‘race to the bottom’ on price. It’s built on an unsustainable and exploitative model, as well as a search by retailers for ever decreasing costs, whether it’s labour or other inputs. 

But are we now living in an age of ‘fast fruit and veg’? When Christmas veg sells for 8p in supermarkets there are uncanny parallels. 

Whether major chains sell at a loss or take the hit in order to boost footfall, it doesn’t matter. The message to consumers is loud and clear – vegetables, like clothes, must be cheap to produce, especially if supermarkets give them away for next to nothing. But, of course, this is far from the truth.

“Food production is in a tricky place right now in terms of sustainability and viability. Is this really good for anyone? The system is exploited beyond expectation [and we] have reinforced the idea that food is undervalued,” explains Jack Ward, CEO of the British Growers Association. 

And when 95 per cent of all fruit and veg consumed in the UK is purchased through the major retailers, this is a major challenge, distorting the vast majority of shoppers’ perceptions about the fair and real cost of production and farmgate prices.  

Like fast fashion, a race to the bottom encourages bad behaviour, whether it’s excessive food waste – think landfill overflowing with clothes – or poor profits for producers with a subsequent slide in long-term perceptions over the real value of these goods. Vegetable growers already have slimmest margins at 1 to 2 per cent. Then there is the lack of transparency from big brands, whether it’s fashion labels or supermarket chains around their business models. 

“The game that supermarkets play is: how hard can we push our suppliers and at the same time make sure we keep them on board? It’s a fine line between, pushing them to the nth degree, but not pushing them over the edge,” states Ward. 

British prices for fruit and veg speak for themselves. To-date they are some of the world’s cheapest. Britons spend a measly 8.5% of their total household expenditure on food, only the U.S., Singapore and Ireland spend less, according to Our World In Data. At the same time, the biggest concern among UK consumers is elevated food prices, states a Food Standards Agency survey.

A race to the bottom

The fact that British supermarkets rely heavily on a global marketplace, just like fast fashion brands, does not help either. This helps facilitate a ‘race to the bottom’ and it also outsources major issues to other countries. 

For instance, Peru is now a significant source country for many high street retailers, yet Water Witness recently said demand from “Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, Aldi, Lidl, Co-op, Waitrose, and M&S, is driving grossly unsustainable patterns of water use, infringement of human rights and environmental degradation, with tens of thousands of farm workers living without access to safe water and sanitation.” Morocco, another preferred sourcing destination, is also in drought.

The government in its own Food Security Report has recently said that “the global water withdrawals that UK food relies on through imports are … increasingly unsustainable.”

“The insidious nature of globalisation is that the problems that happen to people on the other side world where we’re getting this stuff from are hidden away. If we knew more, we would ask why are we doing this? But it’s in a different country, a different place,” details Richard Kipling, Senior Research Advisor at the Sustainable Food Trust.  

“We’ve got nice labels that might tell us things are okay. But is it okay? We don’t really know. I think that’s a really big challenge. It’s therefore hard to engage people on these issues. Growing things more locally can bring better resilience and accountability.”

Who is accountable?

It doesn’t help that there is no clear benchmark from retailers on commitments to source locally from UK growers. “We could produce a huge amount more fruit and veg than we are producing now, but the retailers are bringing in produce and have done so for the last 20 to 30 years – because it’s cheaper. The standards, the labour costs and so on are cheaper, so they are bringing in more and more,” stated Vicki Hird, former Head of Sustainable Farming at Sustain to a parliamentary hearing.

However, unlike fast fashion, there’s been no specific inquiry into the sustainability and viability of the fruit and veg that the public have access to in the UK, although similar language has been used in Westminster in respect to produce. One parliamentary inquiry on the Fairness in Food Prices and Supply the year before last, specifically used the term ‘race to the bottom,’ a moniker widely used in fast fashion.

The inquiry stated: “The concentration of the market in the hands of a small number of supermarkets leads to the lowering of farm gate prices and limits farmers’ choice of where to sell their produce… This ‘race to the bottom’ led to the closure of 26,000 farm holdings in the UK between 2017 and 2022. This is a reduction of 12%.” 

A UK commissioner said recently that the UK lags behind many other countries on supply chain transparency in fast fashion – whether this is the case for fruit and veg, still remains to be seen. All the evidence adds up to an equally dysfunctional market. 

“It’s not defensible to have a system where people aren’t getting high quality food and at the same time farmers aren’t getting paid enough to produce it. This is absolute madness. We want to get to a point where we have highly nutritional and sustainable food that is accessible to everyone and provides a good livelihood to farmers, but we also want it to be healthy, and sustainable,” says Kipling.  

He continues; “In the UK we’ve got a system that really isn’t delivering any of these goals, or if it does, they’re in trade off with one another. We have a few major supermarkets that dominate in economic terms, which is an oligopoly. They compete for market share, so what they’re really competing on is price and it’s like a ratchet effect. This is something they cannot get out of and it leads to the extraction of profits all the way down the supply chain, with growers right at the end.”

Control in the hands of the few, not the many

Such a market is also likely to undermine the resilience of our entire food system since it concentrates control in the hands of a few and externalises responsibilities on issues around food access and affordability, water, climate and sustainability. 

“The big issue is also whether there is enough money in the system now to support the level of reinvestment that’s needed to ensure that we’ve still got an adequate supply of veg in five years’ time with a more unpredictable climate. In the main it’s the growers that face the risk, so they will put up the money to plant the crops, and if they fail, nobody other than the grower picks up the cost,” points out Ward. 

The concept of fast fashion for fruit and veg is an interesting one, because there’s now various campaigns to change the whole paradigm around the culture of clothes, which shouldn’t be so cheap or viewed in such low regard. 

The key aim is to tackle fashion’s huge environmental problems, the money paid to labourers and bad contracts, opaque supply chain, commoditisation based on global supply chains, dominance by high street brands, as well as the sheer volume of waste and its effect on the environment. 

All these issues sound very familiar to those active in fresh produce, maybe those in fruit and veg can learn from campaigns denigrating fast fashion. Certainly, new solutions are needed, whether it involves higher taxes on unhealthy food that are then used to subsidise healthy produce or a systematic shift to local growing initiatives, a lot needs to change and soon. 

The Local Food Plan is one initiative supported by the Sustainable Food Trust, the Food, Farming & Countryside Commission and Sustain among others aimed at supporting more local supply, to diversify retail, shorten supply chains and bring back control to communities in terms of what they eat and who they source from. 

The fast fashion of fruit and veg is not the answer. 

Learn more about Sustainable Food choices as a consumer, with the WL Sustainable Food Series.