Word of Mouth blogFood
Can frozen be better than fresh?
The retail industry is sending out a worrying message with its claims about frozen food
Sales of frozen foods are on the increase. Photograph: David Sillitoe/Guardian
Alex Renton
Tue 10 Feb 2009 08.03 EST
Frozen food sales are up 5.8% on the year, according to retail industry survey company TNS, which fingers the recession as the cause: "Planning meals in advance is the best way to manage spending – and using frozen can be the easiest way to do this without compromising on taste, nutrition and convenience."
Anyone disagree with all three of the assertions in that sentence?
Frozen food is certainly back – sales were up 18% at Iceland at the end of last year, and the British Frozen Food Federation is calling it "the new ice age". In their view, frozen can be cheaper because there is less wastage than there is with "snobby" chilled food at Marks and Spencer (I'm not making this up, it was in the Guardian's business pages in December).
What was not mentioned was the hideous carbon cost of freezing food and then storing it - a cost the industry has never been asked to pay.
Iceland's CEO said in the same article: "Freezing is God's way of preserving food." Interesting. Weren't pillars of salt his usual method?
There is a worrying message in all these statements: They tell shoppers frozen is as good as, or better than fresh. And, historically, consumers end up believing the rubbish the food industry tells them – if it spends enough doing it.
After all, in the 60s many people believed tinned was better than fresh. I wrote a piece about the difficulties of promoting sustainable fish – and the interesting relationship fishmongers have with the truth when it comes to questions of provenance.
In a response the chief scientist for the industry group Seafish, said I was very wrong to accuse fishmongers of passing off frozen as fresh. Modern freezing techniques nowadays make frozen as good as fresh, he stated.
Can this be true? Certainly, if offered the choice between "fresh" cod that's lain on ice in a trawler's hold for 10 days and flash-frozen fish that's been super-chilled with jets of -30C (-22F) air - well, there may be a point. Frozen peas, indubitably, are as good as fresh (does anyone want to dubitate that?) But some things, like soft fruit, will never survive freezing, or, more important, thawing.
By the way, Product of the Year 2009, an event you might call the big food corporations' Oscars – was presented at the Royal Opera House by TV's Danny Wallace last week. The winners in the frozen foods category were Bernard Matthew's Big Tick Drummers, a turkey product, and Aunt Bessie's Large, Light and Crispy Yorkshire Puddings.
Is anyone brave enough to find out if these items are better frozen than fresh?
Food & drink industry