As major retailers rake in huge profits, they are slashing jobs, squeezing suppliers and hollowing out our food industry

Supermarkets can seem as mundane as public utilities, as dull as plumbing – until something goes wrong. If the plumbing goes wrong, the ceiling collapses. But when the supermarket goes wrong, you can’t put food on the table.

The naked vulnerability of the way we produce and sell our food is revealed whenever there is a shock to the system – whether that be fuel protests that disrupt deliveries from distribution warehouses, post-Brexit trade barriers increasing the price of food imported from the EU, or supply crises due to war or climate-related crop failure. In an industry defined by centralisation, concentrated ownership and global supply chains, things go wrong, often, and the problem for us – the shopper, the consumer, the citizen – is our lack of any real alternatives.