#UnwrapCoops “Ingredients, they’re what we say”. 

This is the theme for this year's co-ops fortnight (20th June to 3rd July) and it is all about helping people understand what a co-op actually IS and why transparency is an important part of the ethics of the movement.

The 'ingredients' of co-ops are really the principles under which they are run for the benefit of members - no matter what they actually DO. Although co-ops come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and do different things, most people associate them with food because this was a type of business associated with the growth of the movement in the 19th Century. They were successful because they were responding to a food crisis - with an extreme lack of access to safe, fairly priced foods.

In the pre-industrial period, UK populations were small, and food had to be locally grown and sourced, dried, or preserved in salt. Only seasonal foods were available to ordinary people who were heavily reliant on a good harvest and in rural communities, large chests were built to store grain to provide flour or oats and prevent mould or attack by pests. Cooking processes were designed to make food last longer and preserving fruit allowed sweetness to be added, even in the winter. Unless there was a poor harvest, or a crop blight - most rural people ate better than those in cities (where food had to be brought in and was more expensive) as a result, they tended to live longer and were less malnourished. Change came when the majority of people no longer had rights to farm and forage from the land and couldn’t provide for themselves in a growing wage economy. More people were drawn to urban places and work in factories, but crime and unrest was often linked to the lack of affordable food.

Growing urbanisation in the 18^th and 19^th centuries created more pressure on food availability and adulteration became commonplace. One of the reasons the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers started their society was to prevent dangerous adulterates being put in food to bulk it out. Solving this problem through better chains of supply and investment and stricter food regulations did away with grocers being able to poison their customers, but it led to the assumption that what is in our food today is not adulterated.

Part of the ways in which modern and particularly packaged foods are designed includes not just the taste, but the smell, texture and advertising of food. Less food insecurity and a wider range of foods in the 19^th Century meant that more of the population could have ‘extra’ or surplus foods in their homes and consumers developed a different relationship with them. There are scientific reasons why the foods which are highest in fat, salt and sugar are attractive as they are easier to prepare and digest and are often cheaper than whole grains, unprocessed foods and vegetables. These food types offer high calories and nutrition for people to be able to expend a lot of energy and the dopamine hit received from consuming them means that they can be addictive. Most work in the earlier 20^th century was still manual and populations were less sedentary in their everyday lives. Even doing the laundry for a family of four people had to be done by hand and took most of a day.

Original packaging for Coop 'Cremo' branded oats in 1959 - focusing on convenience and aspirational home life.

People generally used up the calories they consumed on a daily basis and only bought what could be eaten immediately. The biggest differences in consumption came in the changes in the way consumers shopped due to changing working habits and the availability of 'mod cons' such as freezers and later microwaves when more women were working out of the home. From the 1950's onwards, more foods were subject to  scientific testing and marketing  - with more heavily processed 'convenience' foods available from the 1970’s. These foods were made to last longer, with fewer trips to the shops and were sold to appeal to a less labour intensive lifestyle through the addition of stabilisers and emulsifiers which not only make us think food is ‘fresher’ but also have an impact on the ways in which the body releases hormones and controls behaviour through the brain.

The ability to preserve foods led to a need to contain and package them for storage in shops and to keep in homes. Early packaging was paper bags and cartons developed in the 19^th century, followed by glass bottling and canning foods like meat and fish which could keep for up to a year. Once these foods were cheap enough to mass-produce, they needed to be eye catching to develop brand identity and loyalty. For co-ops, there was a balance between using packaging to ensure that customers could trust the contents and advertising food attractively to make profits. Early co-op produced goods tended to go against the Victorian trend of highly decorative colourful packaging, promoting the ethics first. 

CWS Chocolate advertising in 1898 - Although most chocolate was drunk at the time, bars were wrapped in plain paper printed in black and white.

By the 20^th century, co-ops were bigger and more complex and had to compete with other traders, so started to use modern marketing and scientific principles to ‘sell’. They still tried to emphasise quality, but look and feel was starting to be more important. Apart from Fair Trade products and those which are sold with a percentage going to charity, today’s co-op food labelling is very similar to competitors.

Responsibility for listing all the contents of food was begun to inform customers to make good choices. In the late 1980s a Dietary Reference Value committee was set up and national labelling laws were introduced  from 1991 and throughout the 1990s until they were extended in 2005.

Original packaging from 1990 - new guidelines for listing ingredients and nutritional information in values (such as grams and calories).

Because we as consumers have the choices which were not available to our ancestors does not mean that we are not subject to the effects of adulteration! In fact, modern processed foods often contain additives which are not food products and which have been scientifically proven to not only contribute to poor health and weight gain, but actually change the way in which our brains work when we eat them.

Some of the additives in processed foods are there to offer ‘lower fat’ or ‘lower sugar’ alternatives, but the way they work to bond ingredients and prevent them degrading means that they have less natural taste and need extra flavouring and chemicals to be added. The additives used to keep people consuming also contributes to them consuming at higher levels. Why does this happen?  The addition of sodium-based flavourings and acids mean that the brain sends a signal to the body that nutrients are on the way, but the nutrients present in the natural products have been removed so a person can overeat 'empty calories' and remain nutrient poor or even malnourished!

These patterns of behaviour lead to consumers buying more of the highly processed products and consuming them in larger quantities - particularly if these consumers are on low incomes because it is this type of food that is cheapest and most available in areas of high deprivation. With the rising cost of food across Europe due to supply chains affected by conflict and the costs of fuel and inflation; it is becoming more difficult for people to make good choices they can afford.

So, ‘ingredients’ may turn out to be just as important an issue to our communities in 2022 as they were in the time of the Pioneers.

For more information on Co-ops Fortnight, visit: #UnwrapCoops