What is Tesco Real Food?

Posted by Elisabeth Winkler

Journalist and  blogger at Real Food Lover

February 29th 2012

Tesco Real Food is the name of of Tesco’s recipe magazine and website, Tesco.com/realfood.

Launched by Tesco PLC in 2011,  the magazine is given away free by Tesco six times a year as a marketing promotion.

Tesco sells real food in the sense it is tangible, not imaginary. But Tesco food is not what this Real Food Lover calls real food.

I have had this definition on my Real Food Lover blog since 2008.

“What do I mean by real food? As close to nature as it can get. I want mine grown organically – without chemicals and with respect, as close to my home as possible. And wholefoody and unprocessed too, please.”

Others have a similar definition.

The Real Food Festival says: “Real Food is all about great tasting, sustainably and ethically produced food”

Real Foods, based in Edinburgh, has, for the last 30 years, sold: “healthy, natural, organic (real) food to the nation at affordable prices.”

In a blog post responding to Tesco’s recent use of the term “real food”, Real Foods writes: “… ’real food’ is food from which the body can extract the maximum amount of nutrition with the minimum amount of waste; food in its most natural state with the best bits still left in rather than foods that have been processed so that the goodness has been removed and replaced by chemicals which, if not actually harmful, are nutritionally ‘empty’.”

Like the efficient retailer it is, Tesco has done its consumer market research and understands the nation’s need for nourishment. The result is its Real Food marketing initiative. Will it help people eat real food?

The magazine promises 32 “seasonal” recipes on the front cover.

Out of Tesco’s three “Season’s Best” recipes, one features mangoes from Peru. Mangoes are not grown in this country. They can never be seasonal for the UK.

Ten out of the 32 “seasonal” recipes were puddings with no fresh produce at all. Some were for Valentine’s day, Pancake day and Mother’s day. Are these annual celebrations what Tesco means by “seasonal”?

If so, Tesco has misunderstood the importance of seasonal for real food lovers.

Eating seasonally is about enjoying freshly-harvested produce. The fresher and more seasonal the produce is, the more nutrients it has and the better it tastes. That is one of the (many) reasons why local is important because it means the food is fresher when you eat it.

Tesco Real Food magazine’s current issue invites readers to Love Local and check out online its “wide variety of food from local producers around the UK”.

I checked out Tesco.com/local with my Bristol postcode and was directed to the Gloucestershire region. I was offered only eight products, four of which were beer. Yes, all good local produce, including Pieminister pies and cold-pressed rape seed oil.

But eight products do not a local-food-supply-chain make.

Like most supermarkets, Tesco sources globally not locally.

This article on apples gives us a clue.

According to the Telegraph, at the height of the UK apple-growing season in 2010, Tesco sourced only ten per cent of apples from Britain. The rest were imported. However its billboard ads promised ten different British varieties (subject to availability).

I get the feeling Tesco likes using words such as real and seasonal and local and organic because they sound good. But does Tesco subscribe to the principles and practices that underpin these words?

Tesco Real Food magazine’s current issue has an advertising feature for Tesco Organic. It says organic produce is grown “with reduced reliance on fertilisers”.

This is incorrect. Let me explain. Natural fertilisers – such as composted green and animal manures, and nitrogen-rich crops – are crucial to organic farming. This is how the soil is nourished.

On the other hand, chemical fertilisers are banned in organic farming because they strip the soil of life and cause environmental damage including water pollution.

Does Tesco understand organic farming methods? Or is it using organic to make Tesco’s other products – such as intensively-farmed chickens - seem more wholesome?

Here is another example of the mismatch between Tesco Real Food and the reality of Tesco food.

As far as I know (please tell me I am wrong) Tesco still sells foods with trans fats despite a promise to ban them by 2011. Trans fats may make food last longer, but they are essentially candle-wax with huge health risks.

Trans fats are not real food. In fact, they are not even food.

Tesco’s Real Food magazine is glossy, handbag-size and beautifully-presented. In thick bold type, it emphasises words such as “nutritious” and “soul-warming”.

Is Tesco Real Food  the marketing version of trans fats, a cheap filler that tricks us into thinking we’ve been nourished?

Real food producers can tell you exactly what is in their food: how and when and where it was grown, reared, produced and processed – how the land was fertilised, and the farm animals cared for.

Why is Tesco spending its marketing millions pretending to be real?

Real Food Festival 2011 - Review

By Felicity Spector 

Chief Writer Channel 4 News

(Please note that this is Felicity's personal view,  and does not necessarily represent  the views of Channel Four News)

It's a heady mixture of enthusiasm, inspiration and more delicious nosh than you could possibly imagine. This year's Real Food Festival at Earl's Court certainly showcased some of the finest small producers in the country. From hand made chocolates to cheeses, from chutneys to sausages and olive oils, it was a time to celebrate everything that's good about British food.

It's hard to include all the highlights, but I must give a nod to Fiona Sciolti who makes every single one of her chocolates herself - picking the wild flowers and fruits that make up her ganache, sourcing local cream and butter, and dipping and finishing each chocolate by hand. I met her at the Real Food festival a couple of years ago, and she and her family have become great friends.

As for cakes, my other obsession - there were plenty to sample: I've now got a fridge full of brownies from Gower Cottage, Sweet Things and Outsider Tart. I also heroically lugged home a load of chutneys and jams, plus a couple of loaves of bread stuffed with cranberries and pecans. And in a vague attempt to balance it all out - some organic asparagus and strawberries - I guess jam doesn't strictly count as one of my five a day.

There was plenty more on offer, of course, and I tried it all - amazing pork pies, beetroot and pumpkin tortelloni, things with truffles, healthy seedy things and nut butters galore. The most fun, though, came from talking to the producers about their work: this was where the real passion shone through. A very different experience from loading up the trolley at the local supermarket - although I'm not sure I wanted to know quite so much from one salad dressing guy about the history of rape seed oil extraction in the European Union.

I was so busy buying food (and on one long, rather tiring day, actually helping to sell it, as a spare pair of hands on the Sciolti chocolates stand) - that I spent all of 5 minutes checking out the VIP lounge, and forgot to go to most of the chef demonstrations and other talks which I'd planned. I did manage to show up for the Radio 4 debate though, chaired by Sheila Dillon - a thought provoking discussion about the future of the British food renaissance in these challenging economic times. I even made a guest appearance, asking a question - introduced as 'the lady with the astonishing belt'. For the record, it was Sonia Rykiel. Foodies can be fashion mavens too, you know.

Roll on the next Real Food Festival. I've already put the September Harvest fest in the diary - I can hardly wait.

WWF, food and the Real Food Festival

by Duncan Williamson

12/ 04/ 2011

© Adriano Gambarini / WWF-Brazil

Being a conservation organisation we are aware of the impact people have on the natural environment, not least due to agriculture and food consumption. The food system also has a substantial impact on climate change. It is a driving force behind habitat and biodiversity loss and a huge drain on water resources, both due to the direct production of food and the growing of crops to feed animals.

Food is an emotive issue. Everyone has an opinion on it, and people don’t like being told that their food choices might be harming their health or the planet. There are ways you talk about food to encourage people to think about what they are putting in their mouths and where it comes from. The way we consume food in the UK has transformed over the past decades. Global supply chains bring us a wide range of foods in all seasons and we pay less in relative terms for our food than ever before.  However this abundance of cheap food has a downside. We understand, much like the Real Food Show, that people have become disconnected to their food and one way of tackling the issues we is to reconnect people with food, where it comes from, farm to fork.

One Planet Food

Our mission at WWF is to stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature by conserving biodiversity, ensuring the sustainable use of resources and reducing pollution and wasteful consumption. The transition to a more sustainable food system will be central to achieving this.

That’s why we created our One Planet Food programme, incorporating the whole food chain, from the production of commodities (like palm oil and soya) through processing and on to consumption and waste across the food chain. The goals of the programmeare to radically improve the key environmental impacts of the food that is eaten in the UK, including our impact on the parts of the world richest in biodiversity.  WWF is taking a holistic view of the food system looking at the impact current food habits have on climate, biodiversity and freshwater resources.

Habitats under threat

Food production done well is sustainable, resulting in increased soil fertility, protecting biodiversity and enhancing the environment. Unfortunately there are many examples of food being produced in an untenable manner. Consider the production of soybean in Brazil. Vast tracts of previously untouched savannah and forest are making way for huge plantations of the crop, to feed cattle, chickens and pigs. The effects are perhaps at their most stark in Brazil’s Cerrado savannah. The region – which is home to an incredible array of flora and fauna – is being cleared faster than the Amazon. The international demand for beef (and soy) has raised the value of land in the Cerrado, causing the production of beef for domestic consumption to move northwards to the Amazon rainforest.

Then there’s palm oil, used in everything from chocolate bars and biscuits to shower gels. The tropical forests of Borneo and Sumatra, home to the endangered orang-utan, are being cleared at a rapid pace for palm oil. Elsewhere, coffee, fruit juice, wine and even olive oil are among a host of other food imports associated with significant agricultural activity affecting many areas of outstanding ecological importance.

© Staffan Widstrand / WWF

To mitigate the effects of agriculture on habitats and protect against biodiversity loss, we therefore must change the way we consume, including what we eat. In WWF’s Living Planet report we called for a reduction in meat consumption. The government’s recent, hugely influential, Foresight report highlights, amongst other things, the need to change our diets, to eat less resource intensive food. This change will reduce the burden food places on nature. Making changes now willundoubtedly benefit biodiversity, an often overlooked impact of the food system with the focus on climate change.

One Planet Diet

The impact of food consumption on the planet has long been oversimplified, creating a polarised debate on the merits, or not, of vegetarian, vegan and meat-based diets. There are calls to only eat local or seasonal food, cut down your food miles, but what about those producers in developing countries who have responded to UK demand and have tailored markets accordingly? It is possible to eat locally grown tomatoes in December from a heated greenhouse, though the footprint maybe higher than those grown in a southern clime. The majority of food miles are people driving to and from the shops and then there are the foods you can not grow in the UK such as bananas, tea, coffee and chocolate.

We believe, however, that it’s possible to eat well in a way which is good for people and the planet. It’s for this reason that WWF is working on sustainable diets, launching the LiveWell report with the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, experts in developing healthy, specialist diets.

The diet is familiar, normal and varied. Whilst people may debate some of the detail of this report, we firmly believe the overall story won’t change. It’s about small steps, doing what you can. Eat more plants, don’t make meat the central component of a meal, don’t replace meat with diary or fish. By following the Livewell plate you will have a healthy, sustainable diet. It contains everything we normally eat just in different proportions.

What about the farmers?

We see farmers as land mangers that provide a wide range of benefits for the environment and society.Organic farming and high nature value farming deliver a significant proportion of public goods (biodiversity, landscape, water, soil fertility, and climate), and these goods are delivered through careful land management. WWF would like to see farmers paid for these services, public pay for public goods, and as such we are campaigning for CAP reform that recognizes this.  We need to establish a new contract between land managers and society, recognizing the vital role they play in the provision of environmental goods and services.

In general, we believe that agricultural systems need to be developed that are a lot less dependent on fossil fuels. Organic agriculture and utilisation of organic wastes (including human, livestock and food waste) will be needed alongside enhanced soil management, lower energy production systems and better water management.

Food Security

Self-sufficiency of 58% overall suggests that in terms of global supplies the UK food system is resilient in relation to necessities to all but the most disruptive supply shocks.  This masks reliance on imported farm inputs such as animal feed, fertilisers, fuel, pesticides and animal health-care products.  Moreover, there has been a decline in the production of a wide range of agricultural commodities in the UK since 1990.  We now only grow 10% of the fruit we consume.

Reflecting increased consumption and decreasing domestic production, imports of almost all food commodities rose between 1990 and 2005.  This has ‘exported’ the consequences of our buying habits to other countries. GHG emissions, water impacts in vulnerable areas and biodiversity impacts in key ecoregions generate environmental burdens shifted away from the UK.

© James Frankham / WWF-Canon

We can not focus only on UK food security, we are part of global systems and need to think as part of one. The food-price spike of 2007/08 moved agriculture from a sideshow to the main event, especially in the developing world. In 2011 the spectre of increased food prices has returned, with crop failures throughout the world and increased oil prices, and may not go away, with consequences both at home and abroad. Our global food systems are currently far from sustainable. We are undermining many of the ecosystem services that are fundamental to our own wellbeing and the sustainability of our global food systems.

Final thoughts

Any food and farming strategy should be based on securing the basic human rights to adequate food and good health, and on reducing the global environmental impacts of the food we produce and consume. It should not be premised on a continuation of the status quo: widespread hunger, ill health associated with poor diets and increasing environmental degradation

Fat chance we’ll be told the truth...

By Philip Lowery

10/2/2011

 How would you feel if everything you thought you knew about the fundamentals of a healthy diet were wrong and the principles that you thought you understood were actually the opposite of what you should be doing?

 For decades the public in the industrialised world has been advised about what to eat by government departments, usually advised by scientists and researchers. In the UK, that job, until recently has been the responsibility of the FSA. That advice over the last few decades has been very consistent - first, based on the application of the first law of thermodynamics, if you consume more calories than you expend then you will get fatter and our increasingly sedentary lifestyles and increased access to food is seen as one of the key reasons for the current obesity epidemic.

 Second, we have been advised to eat less saturated fat and much more starchy food such as potatoes, cereals, pasta, rice and bread. The eatwell plate recommended by the FSA advises us to cut down on saturated fat as it ‘can increase the amount of cholesterol in the blood, which increases your risk of developing heart disease.’ In the US, the Food Pyramid has a pretty similar message, yet one thing we are clear on is obesity, diabetes and other diet-related illnesses are increasing like a runaway (buffet car) train.

 It’s an odd fact that we so-called intelligent human-beings are the only species on earth that needs to be told what to eat. We are also the only species on earth that suffers from degenerative and chronic diet-related illnesses. Is there a link here and is what we are being told the reason we’re getting ill?

 Over the last decade or so there has been increasing division in the scientific community as more and more researchers and scientists are beginning to question the science and the thinking that got us to where we are now. In particular, some of the key data that was used back in the 50’s to explain why the incidence of heart disease was supposedly increasing is being seriously questioned.

 One of the key movers in the drive to point the finger at saturated fat was an American scientist named Ancel Keyes who studied the influence of diet on health. His now famous ‘Seven Countries Study’ suggested that serum cholesterol was strongly related to coronary heart disease (CHD) and actively promoted this to an increasingly health-conscious public. In essence, Keyes looked at the statistics for CHD in seven countries and plotted this against the intake of saturated fat in the diet, drawing the conclusion, because this is what it indicated, that if you ate more saturated fat you were more likely to get CHD. However what is astonishing is that Keyes had data on 22 countries, but chose only to use the 7 that fitted his hypothesis. In other words, 15 countries pointed to a different conclusion. Ever since this hypothesis began to become accepted, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in scientific research to try to prove these links once and for all and for the last 50 years there has never been any compelling evidence that a low fat diet will protect a healthy person from obesity or CHD.

 So if the science that was used to base the next 60 years of food policy and advice was unsound, where is the good science and what does it say about how we should be eating?

 Gary Taubes is an American science writer who has been diligently reviewing the science around this subject for over a decade. He has two basic problems with the idea that weight can be managed by calorie control. Firstly he argues that this equation doesn’t say anything about the cause. At some point the obese person has consumed more calories than they have expended but this tells you nothing about why that has happened – Jean Mayer, an American nutritionist, said as early as 1954 that to ‘explain obesity by overeating is as illuminating a statement as an explanation of alcoholism by chronic over drinking’

 Secondly Taubes argues that calories in and calories out are not independent of each other but rather are dependent variables – Jerry Scott Flier, an American endocrinologist postulated that ‘an animal whose food is suddenly restricted tends to restrict its energy expenditure by being less active and by slowing energy use in cells thereby limiting weight loss.’ It is now pretty well established and understood that semi-starvation diets cause the body to slow its metabolic rate and to conserve energy.

 So what seems to be going on?  Unfortunately, the regulation of appetite and weight in the human body is almost inconceivably complex and the experimental tools we have to study it are still almost completely inadequate. Nevertheless, it seems that the real culprit behind the last 30 years of increased obesity could very well be the very starchy carbohydrates that we have been advised to eat more of.

 The logic that dictates the more fat you eat, the fatter you will become has a certain symmetry about it that makes it very compelling. However, the reality of what is going on in our bodies is very much more complex. The job of determining how fuels (glucose and fatty acids) will be used, whether we will store them as fat or burn them for energy, is carried out primarily by the hormone insulin in concert with an enzyme known as lipoprotein lipase (LPL). The science suggests that the more insulin in the system, the more fatty acids will be converted to triglycerides which is the form they can be stored as fat. Insulin is secreted into the system in response to blood sugar levels rising, and blood sugars rise when we consume carbohydrates.

 So where does that leave us? Increasing numbers of scientists and increasing numbers of reputable studies are adding to the body of evidence that is telling us that carbs are the problem, not fats. However, very little of this information is being authoritatively communicated to the public. We now have a £multibillion food industry that is built around the model of selling us cheap processed carbs and low fat alternatives to real foods that is supported by the advice handed out by the government, the health service and countless nutritionists and journalists.

But the simple fact is the low-fat, high-carb hypothesis was in fact never based on any good evidence and decades later we have a stack of epidemiological evidence and many intervention studies that show this approach does not work and is actually likely to be detrimental to your health.

 How do you feel about that?