577 UK Supermarkets in 2yrs:(12/2010 Panorama) What Price Cheap Food, mega-farms, animal factories
The Big Four supermarkets are expanding at an unprecedented rate. It's being dubbed the new "space race", with Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrison's fighting for dominance on high streets and shopping malls across the UK. But how can they keep on expanding, and slashing our food prices, when we're in the middle of a global downturn? In a Panorama Special, reporter Paul Kenyon looks behind the cellophane wrappers and the "Buy-one-get-one-frees" to examine the true cost of our cheap food. He visits the mega-farms coming our way from the United States, with cows being kept indoors and milked on giant "dairy-go-rounds", and pigs housed in "sty-scrapers". He also takes a look at space-age greenhouses where fruit grows without soil. The Big Four's UK expansion has never really been charted, until now. Panorama has pieced together the location of every new store currently being planned and built. And as the production costs of our food are driven downwards, saving us pounds during the recession, Panorama carries out pioneering scientific research to discover whether "Made in Britain" always means what it says. BBC One, 9:00PM Wed, 22 Dec 2010
Comments
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At the end of the day, capitalists will do whatever they can get away with to maximise their profits, no matter who they have to crush to do so.
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Confined mass farming of pigs is utterly horrifying - these are intelligent, feeling beings, egregiously abused on a daily basis throughout their (mercifully, under the circumstances) short lives. Providing cheap pork to humans who are none the wiser is not worth this.
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I guess I'm not a cow person - I don't have any personal experience with them - but how does one tell the difference between cows that are contented and cows that have merely become conditioned to accept their circumstances and are placid because they know no better? Learned helplessness is a thing. And I have to say, the calves didn't look particularly happy. I dare say that anyone visiting an 18th-century plantation in the US would have said the slaves looked 'contented' too.
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53:18 YOU DID BLAMED THE INTERNET YOU FKING SON OF A B**
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Why don't they pay UK TAX?
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I hope anyone that will see my comment will stop and think. "every cow eats about 100 pounds of food and drinks 30 galons of water" Each of them produces 70 pints of milk.
How is this sustainable? How can you justify the production? How about the manure, waste by products such as every one of these have to have a calf a year to produce milk, as they are mammals? Females are safe, they are kept to follow the footsteps of their mothers, males are killed on day 1 to four latest. How is this normal and humane?
How about the water usage? How about the world going dry? All these ads about saving water, yet every one of these drinks 30 galons a day!!! And that is just the animal, how about producing food for it, how much water you use on that? THINK! -
When retailers start to build schools and police offices they will then demand control of the education and police. Then they can use the educational system to teach nothing other than their plots. And have debtors thrown in prison or create policed enforced prison workers.
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Eventually they will develop a way to develop milk without mammals.
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why the fuck did we need to get so upset when farmers lose there jobs.
people lose there jobs all time, move forward or get left behind -
"Although we care passionately for our cows, agriculture is just a business" - Will someone slap this dickhead.
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I prefer the taste of dairy products or meats from cows allowed to graze.
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Somewhat informative. We've been eating this shit in the US for a long time now. I can't remember the last time I bought a supermarket tomato. Tasteless marbles that are all the same size because they are picked while green by machine and must be hard and uniform in shape and size. When I worked I had a customer who sold a small machine for gassing the fruit to ripen it. I forget the type of gas but they sell thousands of them annually along with the gas.
In one supermarket chain I can never find green bananas. In another they are green but are ripe the next day. I used to be able to mix green and yellow so I'd get a few days before they were inedible (good for banana bread though).
One thing I find decent in one chain is apples. In the fall They'll have at least 15 varieties and I love buying one of each (drives the checkout person nuts) because they all have different tastes. That is something we didn't get when I was young. -
The human race is going down a very wrong path, destroying everything that it has been gifted with from nature.
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agenda 21 in full swing????
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Doesnt this music sound like Conan the Barbarian.
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All this does, from a semi-foodie who lives on a pretty low income perspective, is make me think about how 'progress' is not always a good thing. Don't get me wrong I'm aware that we can't stay stuck in a 50s idle, and that there's more than just sheer profit/consumer finance at work with intensive and industrial farming - such as wider overpopulation globally - But surely it's more about doing more with less, and looking at alternatives than reducing living creatures down to little more than a digital watch (a soulless entity for which there is only one purpose and no consideration to be paid), I know it's not just with cows, chickens and pigs have been reared this way since the 70s, and you could argue that the educational/employment/political establishment would wish that mindset of unquestioning button pushers of the people all in the name of progress.
There's an expression I heard as a child that would seem to fit the demands being placed on farmers for cheaper and cheaper products (until they've no choice but to work like this) - 'I Want Never Gets' - Perhaps it's time for someone in the industry to genuinely say: "No, you will pay us what it's worth and we will tell the people how it's made, if you're unhappy I'll sell to someone else". -
UK government love hunger of the people, and they show this love with powerful impunity, just look at the tory bitch baroness jenkins rubbing the poors faces in it in the tabloids, mainly the Telegraph [poor going hungry because they can't cook]
These disgusting fucks want to see the return of scabies, scurvy, pellagra, rickets and all the rest of it return to the UK, but they still want and expect you're vote to elect them. -
It's simple, the government makes it harder and harder to earn money so we have less for food so we buy cheap crap to eat because it's all we can do to stay alive, thusly the supermarkets have us and local businesses by the balls, then the big 4 bribe local councils because even they have no money to work with because all their money is being used in foreign aid and war.
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While yes people want cheap food.. because would you know it its a life necessity and people shouldn't have to put themselves out just to be able to buy a few fresh foods.. Its not just the people who want cheap food and rightfully so.. but its the companies that want that HIGH profit.. If the companies decided for instance to make only 1 million $ vs 5 million $ (simple example only) things wouldn't be so bad.. but these people are not satisfied unless they are making the maximum profit that is well beyond what is actually needed.. I don't like it when these documentaries put it JUST on the people who want cheap food.. I think it mostly sums down to greed from these mega corporations..
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Environmentally conscious people complaining about an abundance of fuel in the form of effluent?
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