I needed some milk the other day so I jumped in the jam-jar and shot round to my local Spar. There, I found full-cream milk, skimmed and semi-skimmed milk. Quite a lot of it. Three hundred and sixty pints actually, plus a host of other dairy products. In my small home town of South Woodham Ferrers – inconspicuously tucked-away down here in the south-east corner of Essex – there are, I reckon, six other retail outlets capable of supplying me with large quantities of milk, one of which is Asda. Were I actually mad enough to do so, I could station myself at the end of the dairy aisle 24 hours per day and witness the removal of thousands of large milk containers week-in, week-out for years and years on end. By national standards, ours is a small Asda.
There are over 300 branches of Asda in this country.
There are more than 400 branches of Morrisons.
There are more than 400 Marks & Spencers.
Tesco is now a global concern with 1,779 outlets in the UK alone.
Spar, too, has thousands of shops spread across the country.
Sainsburys has, at April 2012, over 800 outlets in the UK.
There are tens of thousands of small independently operated corner shops between Lands End and John o’Groats all selling milk, and one mustn’t forget, of course, the surviving independent dairies that produce and deliver the stuff to our homes.
On top of this, we now have the phenomenon of petrol-stations which, apparently, sell us motor-fuel as an afterthought, food being the main focus of their business. There are, again, thousands of these garages, all capable of selling us hundreds of pints of milk at any given time. And all of the above sources can supply milk in powder-form too, plus cheese, yoghurt, fromage frais, ‘Gulp’, ‘Yazoo’ ‘Frijj’ and Milky Bar!
I have, over the last 40 years, travelled 72,000 miles going to and from the Norfolk Fens alone. Countless other expeditions have taken me up all the motorways, all the ‘A’ roads, thousands of ‘B’ roads and countless meandering country lanes, but how many cows have I seen? I can’t remember the last time I saw a decent herd yet it is glaringly obvious when you review the above statistics that we should be jostling with the bovine community for standing room. But no! I can barbel the day away in Bedfordshire, pike from dawn ’til dusk in Norfolk and do a Wessex week-ender under canvas and see no more than a few Fresians with their heads down. Ok, you’ll see a few in Herefordshire, but only enough to stock the Quik-e-Marts of Bradford. Think about it. Think of just your county then consider the supermarket-based pyramid of retailers capable of supplying you and 70,000,000 other residents of Great Britain with the means to make a milkshake; would you not agree that only a herd the size of a thousand wilderbeest migrations is up to such a job and that Farmer Ted is kicking us up the arse?
There is obviously something going on here, and I believe it to be no coincidence that Tesco, Asda and all the other major retailers are rapidly expanding their petrol operations: milk is, clearly, a by-product of oil!
I think we should be told.
Cliff Hatton.
