Short version: Waitrose is getting rid of some of their packaging, but didn’t stock yams.
Long version:
British Supermarkets
The United Kingdom has a much more diverse supermarket landscape than the Australian duopoly I grew up with. The British landscape is tiered, with M&S and Waitrose as the expensive, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco as the middle, and Aldi, Iceland, and Lidl as the cheaper options. In my shopping there is a noticeable contrast in the demographic of the customers at Waitrose compared with Aldi, both on Oxford’s Botley Road. I suspect this is a product of the price differences appealing to different socio-economic classes. The data, however, suggests the difference is small.
The photo from the week is of Waitrose’s “Unpacked” campaign around removing packaging from their stores. Reducing waste is commendable, and the campaign has been successful in encouraging me to purchase more items from Waitrose. However on visiting many of the independent grocery stores on Cowley Road I realised that “Unpacked” is actually the default way of selling goods, rather than an “innovation”.
Yams
I tried cooking yams this week, as part of a larger project to improve my cooking by working through a single cookbook (written by the team of the former London restaurant Food for Thought).
The first problem was that I didn’t actually know what a yam is. The wikipedia page offers a disambiguation. This raises the question as to why a tuber produced primarily in equatorial regions would be popular in the UK. The ready availability of carribean food in general (of which yams are a component) in the UK is partially due to the Windrush generation. Finally a pop culture note: Kendrick Lamar’s yams are “authenticity, sex, and drugs“.
粽子
This Friday was the Dragon Boat Festival ( 端午节 ). My quest for yams brought me to some Chinese supermarkets here in Oxford and the presence of banana leaf wrapped rice (粽子) reminded me of the traditional Chinese holiday, and the story of Qu Yuan (屈原).
