In defence of Asda's 2p sausage

Monday June 9, 2008

Cheap food gives us the choice to spend our money on something more interesting instead, says Justine Brian

When Asda last week announced that it was cutting the price of its Smart Price budget sausages from 54p for eight to just 16p, a small flurry of headlines and commentators asked how a sausage could only cost 2p. The question of whether the 2p sausage is ‘good’ is not merely a question of taste but one fraught with a whole range of other contemporary concerns.

One has to assume that Asda are running a loss-leader on the sausages in order to attract shoppers from their rivals – this is one banger amongst many in the supermarket price wars. Ironically, at a time of rising food prices, the debate about the economy sausage is for many commentators and campaigners the latest illustration of the ‘problem’ of cheap food.

Firstly you have quality: as a bit of a sausage snob myself, I know that something with only 34 per cent meat might be a bit fatty and gristly for my personal tastes, being bulked out with rusk and other parts of the pig we don’t normally eat.

Then there was the question of health – the cheap sausage being discussed in a similarly appalled way to that other recent supermarket bad boy, the cheap Grade A chicken (that apparently pus-filled, diseased and unhealthy carcass that threatened the health of all those who ate it). And when I was on BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show last week with Professor Tim Lang of City University to discuss this cheap sausage, I found myself mugged by a barrage of apparently related issues: global warming; agricultural imperialism; the risk of BSE if we move from grain fed to meat fed livestock; the obscenity of a 2p sausage when so many of the world’s people are starving. But let’s be clear – the cheap sausage is not the cause of food shortages in South Asia or tortilla protests in Mexico. Nor should those who eat them feel they are in some way contributing to a screwed-up world.

Pragmatic

Underlying much of this discussion, particularly on the question of health and quality, is the idea that those who buy cheap food, from cheap supermarkets, lead cheap and uninformed lives. There is an assumption on the part of those who claim to know what’s good for ‘us’ that we don’t know how to make value judgements about what we’re buying and eating – that those who want or need to buy a cheap product over a more expensive one don’t know that there’s probably going to be a trade-off in quality. It’s almost as if families haven’t always made pragmatic choices about what goes into the shopping basket to get the family fed as well and as cheaply as possible.
 
Much of the outrage at the supermarkets today is because campaigning consumers feel that the shopping giants are providing consumers with the ‘wrong’ type of choices. They assume that the 2p sausage buyer is too poor or too thick to make the correct food choices, and that the supermarkets, as the nation’s food providers, should be making our choices for us (delete as appropriate: low fat/sugar/salt/seasonal/local/organic/free range). It’s bad enough having the government paternalistically making choices for us without the supermarkets joining in.

So, I find myself in the odd position of defending a 2p sausage. It really won’t do you any harm, it won’t be inedible (or it wouldn’t sell), and it probably does a good job between two slices of sliced white with a blob of brown sauce.
 
I don’t want to be in the position of defending rubbish food, and nor do I think it’s right that those who can’t afford better should make do with inferior products. So to come to the defence of a cheap, pink, low-meat supermarket sausage might seem an odd thing to do. But this debate has little to do with bangers and everything to do with the way forward for producing food. Over the past 50 years the cost of food has fallen, through intensified production and economies of scale, which is a good thing. It allows us to spend less on simply surviving and gives us the choice to use our time and money on something more interesting instead. The people who turn their noses up at the benefits of cheap food deserve to be panned.

Justine Brian is a food enthusiast and national administrator for the Institute of Ideas’ Debating Matters Competition