The freshness and diversity of Italy’s offer put UK supermarkets to shame, says Joanna Blythman


There’s nothing like a trip abroad to highlight the shortcomings of the fruit and vegetables we are presented with in the UK.

During a recent stay in Bologna, the foodie capital of central Italy, it was a constant pleasure to select and cook with the produce on offer. Of course it’s easy to be dazzled by little-known (at least in the UK) greens such as leafy cima di rapa or crunchy puntarelle, but more familiar offerings like lettuces, tomatoes and citrus are also patently superior.

What hits you between the eyes in Italy is the true, as opposed to counterfeit, freshness of the produce, and its intrinsic diversity. I’m not talking about stocking every horticultural product on the planet although these days, you’ll find everything from root ginger to okra without difficulty but genuine variation. Unimpressed by identikit produce that could have been cloned because it’s so standardised, Italians appreciate irregularity. They’ll go for a curvy, natural-looking Sicilian pepper over the standard body fascist Dutch sort any day, or plump for a cosmetically flawed, knobbly but fragrant Amalfi lemon over the rock hard, immature sort you see here.

Italy does have a climatic edge on the UK, but the excellence of its horticultural offer also reflects how most produce is sold in independent shops and markets, so it isn’t compromised by the dead hand of big retail. Here, supermarkets and their ever-obedient category captains have the green trade stitched up and get away with selling a lazy, monotonous range of lacklustre produce at unjustifiably high prices. Anything the least bit more interesting muscat grapes, artichokes, fennel, new potatoes gets stuck in the ‘speciality’ category so they can brazenly charge even more for it.

At the moment, Italians are eating fabulous blood oranges at 80p a kilo. If you could find these delights in the UK, they would cost about four times the price.

Our supermarkets have proven to be incompetent greengrocers and greedy to boot. An inquiry into their fresh produce mark-ups is long overdue. To compound the cost insult, they still can’t sell us a peach worth eating.

Silvio Berlusconi’s behaviour has humiliated Italians and tarnished the country’s national reputation. Our retailers have dealt British people a similar blow by making us infamous for eating the worst fruit and vegetables in Europe.

Joanna Blythman is a food journalist and author of Bad Food Britain.

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