I have not been carried away by the current wave of enthusiasm for the German discounters, though I can see the attraction. Their small, contained stores are light relief for shoppers who have become bored with traipsing up and down never-ending aisles in vast retail sheds to track down what they actually need.

Honest pricing helps, too. In Aldi and Lidl, the price is the price, a clear-cut alternative to the bamboozling smoke-and-mirrors promotions of the big chains, which give with one hand, and take away with the other. Who can sniff at 10 flat peaches for £1? I dread to think what the big chains would charge for these in their ‘speciality peach’ ranges.

But there is no way I could do all my shopping in either Aldi or Lidl. The range is hopelessly restricted. I regularly buy tahini, for example, but I won’t find it there. The people I know who use these chains merely cherry-pick a few lines.

“There is no way I could do all my shopping in either Aldi or Lidl”

If I’m in the vicinity, I might drop into Lidl to stock up on 24 month-aged Parmesan, which costs about two-thirds to a half of what I’d pay elsewhere. Its tinned peaches are lush, and the other day I got a bargain bag of Californian walnuts. But there’s no way I’m going to go out my way to visit stores with such a lamentable cheese offer (plastic-wrapped, immature), where the only organic milk is skimmed (forget it, I want full-fat), and the shelves are stacked with spongiform frankfurters in jars.

And to be honest, what I do like about the German discounters is their foreignness, the thrill of their limited seasonal imports, lines like Lidl’s reindeer meat and Madagascar vanilla pods, but even then, a few swallows don’t make a summer.

Earlier this month, following a series of complaints from the Protect Wild Scotland group alleging that Aldi was selling intensively farmed Norwegian or Faroese fish as wild Scottish salmon, the chain removed the ‘Best of Scotland’ in-store branding that was placed next to the product in question.

There’s nothing new here. In April, Tesco scrapped a marketing campaign after it emerged its ‘100 per cent Scottish’ salmon came from Norway. But the discounters are no answer to my retail prayers.

Joanna Blythman is a journalist and author of What to Eat

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