3 December 2025

Welcome to the supermarket class war

How Britain’s upper middle class learned to love expensive carrots

Photo by Dukas/Universal Images Group Via Getty Images

I once met a girl so posh that she did not think it remarkable that her golden retriever’s preferred snack was bresaola. I rarely turn my nose up at indulgence but this did stretch my “live and let live” philosophy a little thin. It came to mind as I was wandering through Harrods Food Halls and the dry-aged beef caught my eye. OK, Boz the retriever is certainly upwardly mobile. But is he “olive-fed wagyu bresaola at £15/100g” upwardly mobile? Sorry for your hardship, pooch.

I am inspecting the state of England’s luxury grocery habit. There was a time when the Harrods Food Halls, with Selfridges in a supporting role, were the primary way to serve the wonts of west London’s elites and their bresaola-inclined canines. From the late Seventies, with its fishmongers and butchers and parsimonious fresh produce sections, Harrods operated like a patrician Tesco for those who wouldn’t countenance the fluorescent lighting and freezer sections of Britain’s standard supermarkets – those Warburtons, Heinz and Viennetta meccas.

In 2025 I find something rather different in Harrods Food Halls. This is a Disneyland for tourists; American accents swirl around the pomegranate counter. I look about – why is it so busy on a Monday? Not everyone here can be reporting on London’s most expensive shallots. It was AA Gill in 2013 who called this place an “edible Madame Tussauds”, and he was right. If Harrods ever operated as a real grocery store, it is all potemkin now.

I find 33 lobster rolls, lined up with the care and precision of the King’s soldiers at Trooping the Colour, £18 a go. Your cat might like those. And as for the “topped carrots” at £6.40 each (each!) – well, I am sure Flicka the palomino wouldn’t sniff twice. But this is a relic. Head out of Knightsbridge and you quickly learn that there are so many more vectors for wealth than department stores, no matter how much they dominated the 20th century. Harrods’ hegemony among the wealthy epicure is gone, as boutique luxury supermarkets invade the leafiest postcodes.

Venture to W11. “Supermarket of Dreams” caters to the Holland Park set these days. It is a small room, so small in fact that the pasta, chocolate, tinned sardines, chilli oil, coffee, cannellini beans, crackers, apple cider vinegar and raspberry jam are in the same cabinet. The line between dream and nightmare is thin. The chickens, I learn, were fed on a balanced cereal-based diet, thank goodness. Meanwhile, the bottarga di muggine (a fist-sized, cured mullet roe pouch) goes for £19.95. No, after you. I insist!

In 1997 Bayley & Sage first opened its doors in Wimbledon, but it was only in recent years the concept really took flight. A new branch on Hampstead High Street looks remarkably like a grocery store, but I know a museum exhibition when I see one. Each display comes bearing an explanatory label, as though you are parsing a Monet at the National Gallery. I learn that Comté is made from the milk of Montbéliarde or Simmental cows. At the saucisson exhibit I learn this cured sausage is the product of Roman and Gallic integrated preservation techniques.

But what I learn most of all is that none of this is really about food. Or, it’s certainly not about cooking. Because at Harrods I had tried to assemble the ingredients for a bolognese, but was thwarted by the fact that they don’t sell tomatoes, tinned or otherwise. At Bayley & Sage I encounter “parmesan and basil salt” for £10 – which anyone who can cook will tell you is functionally useless for making anything other than piles of parmesan and basil salt.

And so, if it’s not about food then I wonder what all this consumption is a symptom of. In downwardly mobile Britain, it’s becoming harder for the upper middle to signal status. The expensive cheese, the fish, the lectures in ancient meat curation: it’s all a way of saying, “Hey – I’m still in the game.” Even if that game is 20 bucks on cured fish or bresaola for the dog. London’s wealth has moved to Zone 2, we know that much. And perhaps it just doesn’t stretch so far these days.

[Further reading: What we can learn from Beaujolais nouveau]