Supermarkets have groomed us to accept subpar fruit & veg

It’s rare to hear a genuinely fresh approach to fixing our floundering food system, but Natoora’s CEO, Franco Fubini, does just that in his new book, In Search of the Perfect Peach.

Natoora is known for supplying ‘flavour-first’ fruit and vegetables to chefs and high-end shops like Eataly. Fubini believes supermarkets have de-educated us about fruit and vegetables – and I heartily endorse his sentiment.

We’ve been groomed to accept watery cultivars, bred for yield and transportability, and produce with any biodiverse trait or breath of seasonality edited out.

Supermarkets, in Fubini’s words, have “dumbed us down” and presided over a loss of gastronomic knowledge: how to cook, what produce is in season when, how to eat together, even how to set a table.

How can we reclaim our food culture from this destructive influence?

Flavour is Fubini’s answer. Why flavour? His experience, as a greengrocer par excellence, is that time and time again, flavour is the most reliable signifier of good farming practices, optimum soil health, and superior nutrient content.

He illustrates this with profiles of some of the most celebrated cultivars – the white greta peach, the marinda tomato, the breme onion. He explains the peculiarities of cultivation and the key factors, such as stress and salinity, that impart desirable, distinctive attributes – but only, of course, when cultivated in their natural season.

Fubini’s book reminded me of visiting a playgroup in February. At the end of the play session the tots were given little cups filled with banana, grapes, and melon. Doubtless the organisers saw this as a healthy snack. Better than biscuits. But none of this fruit was from the UK or appropriate for the time of year.

“If we all stopped buying strawberries in the middle of winter, you can be certain the supermarkets would stop selling them and farmers wouldn’t grow them,” writes Fubini.

Is he right? Certainly the way we design menus, school food education, and our eating habits, need to evolve to acknowledge that flavour – and the farming methods that underpin it – is the best starting point for restoring health and environmental sense to our food culture.

What have we to lose by putting taste centre-stage? British enthusiasm for fruit and vegetable consumption is currently insipid at best. A flavour-driven revolution would be joyful, and ultimately transformative.

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