Catherine 🏳️‍🌈

Mrs. Jenkins, 1970, walks down the high street with a wicker basket. - Beef topside from Mr. Pearson, for Sunday - Streaky bacon, sliced thick on the slicer - Lamb's liver for Tuesday tea - Pork sausages, made on the premises that morning - A whole chicken, giblets in a paper bag inside - Suet for the steak and kidney pudding - Butter wrapped in greaseproof paper - A wedge of Lancashire from the wheel - Two dozen eggs from the farm down the road - Double cream for the trifle - A pound of dripping in a stoneware pot, for the chips - Four kippers for Saturday breakfast - A loaf baked that morning, four ingredients Total: about £6. She fed a husband and three children for the week, with leftovers for Monday. Nobody was overweight. Nobody had high cholesterol. Nobody was on any pills. Her granddaughter, 2026, opens the Tesco app on the sofa. - Six chicken breasts, water-injected - "Low-fat" turkey mince - Yoghurts with 14 ingredients per pot - Flora "buttery" spread, palm oil and rapeseed - A bottle of skimmed milk - Pre-grated "mature" cheddar with anti-caking agent - Two ready meals branded "Healthy Living" - "No added sugar" cordial, three artificial sweeteners - "Soft white medium" loaf, eleven ingredients - "Fruit and nut" bars, glucose syrup and rapeseed oil - Squeezable mayonnaise - Pre-washed salad treated with chlorine - Olive oil, for the "Mediterranean" diet she read about Total: about £127. She feeds herself and her husband for three days and orders again on Wednesday. She is, in her early forties, on statins. Her husband is on metformin. The grandmother traded a butcher for a megafarm. A cheese counter for an anti-caking agent. A dairyman for a logistics chain. Dripping for rapeseed oil. A four-ingredient loaf for an eleven-ingredient one. A wicker basket for an app. She paid twenty times the price for worse food, less of it, and threw her health in as part of the deal. The supermarket called this progress. Mrs. Jenkins would have called it being had.