Monday 19^th June 2006

The 'Fresh' Food People

The tag line, "The Fresh Food People", is a bare faced lie and it makes my blood boil that Woolworths is not prosecuted in court for its deception in marketing, its endangerment to public health and its damage and distortion to proper economic functioning. Coles is little different on the price and quality front for their fresh food, but at least they don't so brazenly misrepresent their offerings.

The ever more health aware public unknowingly fill their trolleys with unworthy produce from the fruit and veg section and pay prices multiples higher than available from a decent market, which will offer decently priced food that is actually fresh. And yet, I am expected to believe the incessant Woolworths advertising that their stores are staffed by people who work hard to supply fresh food to its customers at the lowest possible prices.

The often limp lettuces languishing on their shelves, reveal their true age to anyone who has instead chosen to spend their hard-earned at a real produce market as I have done every week or so for years. I know that it is possible to buy a lettuce with a fuller head and at a lower price. Even more amazing is that I can get home, throw it into the lower shelf of my fridge and forget about it, only to rediscover it a week later and see it looking about the same as when I bought it. The naive could easily conclude that the lettuce is still a couple of weeks yet, before it is "ripe enough" to eat....

The Woolworth's web site has the gall to advise me that a mandarin has a shelf life of three to five days! Why is it then that I just had that last of some mandarins I bought a fortnight ago, which were still fine to eat?

At a real market, we can discover apples at less than half the price - apples that will wet your chin as you crunch into them; we can find more than one type of banana and at different stages of greenness or ripeness; and we can notice how many things are really hard to find at times, simply because they are not in season.

And we can be relieved that instead of spending $70 on fruit and vegetables, we can pay $20 instead.

Oh, to be fair, the markets are much cheaper for a reason: People go without mood music, on floors strewn with vegan litter, and no trolleys are supplied. The fruit is not as uniform as it is claimed to be at Woolies, so if you want each Granny Smith to be the same shape, look and feel, you will be obliged to take a little more time to choose. But if you want that same woody or pasty quality common at the supermarket then be prepared to search for a longer still...

And what makes me even angrier is that the big chains don't have to include GST, because it is "fresh food!" Explain to me how it is that an apple that has been in cold storage for three months or fruit induced to ripen as they are about to be stocked the shelves is any different to a chocolate cake, which is subject to GST?

So perhaps like Al Capone, we won't be able to throw Woolies against the wall for their fresh food crimes against smaller retailers, the farmers, our children and society at large, but instead we may watch as Woolies is hauled in for failing to pay the tax man what the tax man is due.

(C)opyright Sylvano Lucchetti.