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Over the last two generations one of the triumphs of capitalism has been consumer companies’ ability to anticipate what their customers wanted, or thought they wanted, and provide it for them. They have done this through relentless analysis of their customers, where they live, what they buy, when they shop. Supermarkets have been at the forefront of this trend, but others have learnt to be just as adept and spend millions of pounds every year to refine their marketing, their choice of stock and where they site shops. Often what you put into your basket or which outlet you visit is determined not by you, but by the company, many of whom have worked out exactly who they want through their doors. And who they don’t.
I too have tried to mine the data and find out more about these different middle classes – and indeed about those that are still outside the 70 per cent. From toffs to chavs, from posh wankers to gyppos. The class system still throws up terms of abuse with a vitriol that would be unacceptable when describing race, sex or age. Working class is only occasionally heard as a straight description; it is usually as a nostalgic badge of honour worn by those who have made it to the House of Lords. Instead we have the underclass, the benefits spongers, the feckless, the scroungers. What’s left of the upper classes, too, come in for an equally rough ride. Posh, public-school toffs are to be laughed at, in their ‘Look at my fucking red trousers’ and appearances in the pages of Tatler. The middle classes, in becoming ever wider, have pushed those outside of its ranks to the margin, so far away from normal life as to be comic-book creations fit only for ‘scripted reality’ shows.
Although this book is mostly concerned with products, shops and brands, it is really about people, all of them in some way members of the modern British consumer classes. Class does not reside in products, it only takes shape in ownership of those things or rejection of them. I hope their stories, and my story too, will explain a little bit about where we have ended up in Britain today.
CHAPTER 1
How did something as innocent as a lunchtime sandwich or morning coffee become the cause of social anxiety? Here we meet the Asda Mums.
The ready meal was nothing new in 1979. TV dinners were in existence before the advent of colour television, and Fray Bentos pies had long been available to consumers unwilling or unable to take the time to cook their own evening meal.
But in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher swept to power promising to bring harmony to the discordant classes, the ready meal went upmarket, thanks to Cathy Chapman, then 24-year-old head of poultry development at Marks & Spencer. She had already enjoyed success thanks to the simple, though radical for the time, idea of removing first the skin from a chicken breast, and then the bone from a thigh. The following year the breast became coated in Japanese breadcrumbs – crunchier, denser breadcrumbs than a home cook could ever produce from a stale piece of sliced white. Her next product, however, took it to another level.
It was the chicken Kiev. Now, for some, an object of derision, as naff as a tie-dye shirt or snowball cocktail, then, a sophisticated bistro dish that had been appearing on the menus of London restaurants for a few years. It was the first ‘middle-class’ ready meal and helped pave the way for the produce we see on our supermarket shelves today: everything from cheese and ham chicken Kievs from Iceland (£1 for 2) to Charlie Bigham’s Moroccan chicken tagine from Waitrose (£5.99). The ready meal industry is now worth £1.22 billion every year and is at the front line of a never-ending class war over food. Mealtimes have always been fraught, but over the last generation as our diets have become ever more varied, exotic and full of choices, the opportunities to feel bad about what you have put on your plate have been been greater than ever.
Back in 1979, when most people probably thought a Moroccan tagine was something you either smoked or sat on, high-quality cuisine meant French cuisine. Chapman lived in Islington, north London, just 400 yards from Robert Carrier, a restaurant in Camden Passage named after its owner, by then a television star, best-selling cookery writer, innovator of the wipe-clean recipe cards, and proud owner of two Michelin stars. In 1975 the restaurant had hosted dinner for the Queen Mother and Lord Grimthorpe, the first time Her Majesty had dined out in a public restaurant since before her marriage in 1923.1 Chapman was encouraged by her bosses at M&S to eat at the best restaurants, and it was at Carrier that she first tried chicken Kiev.
‘Yes, I liked it. What’s not to like? Butter, garlic and a crisp outside,’ she recalls. Her taste of crispy, buttery heaven coincided with the rise of an entrepreneur called John Docker, ‘who believed this kind of food – chicken Kiev, prawn cocktail, duck à l’orange – could and should be available to a wider audience,’ explains Chapman. He set up a factory and staffed it with professional chefs who would then sell their pre-prepared meals for restaurants to re-heat. But he had ambitions for families at home also to enjoy this sophistication. And when he showed the dish to M&S, Chapman and her team decided Britain was ready for the first-ever chilled ready meal.
This is what made it different. It was not a boil-in-the-bag meal that you bought from the freezer cabinet, or a dismal pie in a tin. This was a dish presented in an aluminium tray, in the chiller cabinet of a supermarket, still a relatively small area dedicated to dairy products. It was protected by a cardboard box, with a glossy photograph on the front, and sold for £1.99 – the equivalent of about £8 in today’s money, a premium price for a premium product. They even, in the early days, came with a little paper chef’s hat on the sprig bone that protruded from the meat to make it look worthy of a magazine photo shoot. ‘It was really upmarket, fresh prepared food, the first time we’d done restaurant quality meals. It was a very big launch.’ This was food for the middle classes, and the upper middle classes at that.
Like all big launches for M&S it had to be approved by the board of directors. At this point the Kiev was nearly torpedoed. ‘My boss at the time, the head of food, said when he tasted it, “It’s got garlic in. I don’t like garlic, people don’t like garlic” – and said it shouldn’t be put on the shelves.’ This was not an uncommon view at the time. But with six weeks to go before launch it was too late to back out. With all the boxes printed, Chapman was forced to persuade the director he was wrong, and a Kiev without garlic was pointless.
She was right. It was an immediate hit. The dish was the height of sophistication, with its very name evoking exotic, Cold War Russia (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of television’s hits of 1979), while the oozing, melting, garlicky butter hinted at a continental elegance that most people in winter-of-discontent Britain could only dream of. The first weekend, £10,000-worth was sold, and they ran out; production was immediately doubled. Within four weeks this one dish was bringing £50,000 a week into the M&S tills. ‘The sales were phenomenal and it became a talking point at the time. People would have dinner parties and serve it, saying, “Here’s one I made earlier,” and it wasn’t; it was one they’d bought at the end of the road.’ To this day, Marks & Spencer, despite its food sales being one-tenth the size of Tesco, sells more chilled ready meals than any other retailer in Britain2 and its dine-in-for-£10 meal deal during the recent recession was the salvation for many Portland Privateers and Middleton class people who had been forced to cut back on eating out at their local restaurant.
M&S’s timing was impeccable