Retailers must ditch the Early Learning Centre approach to fruit and veg, says Joanna Blythman
I do wish supermarkets would stop treating us like children when it comes to buying fruit and vegetables. A case in point is M&S trying to flog us very expensive diminutive watercress designed to fit into a sandwich. So what's the problem with the already-small normal stuff, other than you can't charge so much for it ?
With the honourable exception of tomatoes, miniature this (turnips, avocados, courgettes,) and baby that (fennel, kiwis, melons, spuds) are superfluous, often idiotic gimmicks whose purpose is to add value for the retailer, not give consumers more genuine choice. The same can be said for all those packs of over-crowded, flaccid seedling salads growing on substrates. We all grew cress on blotting at primary school, but we've grown up now.
For decades we were stuck with one solitary variety of water-logged, hydroponic bell pepper. To stop terminal boredom setting in, and to give a faux impression of diversity, supermarkets sell them in traffic-light packs. They look cheery in an Early Learning Centre sort of way, but are useless from a cook's point of view. Apart from in the Middle East, where they feature in time-honoured recipes, green peppers are pretty much an under-ripe waste of space. Ditto their orange lookalikes. What cooks need is an affordable pack containing only red peppers, but supermarkets make you buy red peppers loose and pay more for them. I wonder why ?
The thinner-skinned, more flavoursome Romano pepper was a rare improvement. The next logical move would have been to introduce further botanical varieties of peppers, sun-grown outdoor ones or similar. But you can't teach an old dog new tricks, so, in a ghastly case of history repeating itself, Romano peppers are also being given the tri-colour treatment.
It's the same throughout the produce section. There's a frisson of excitement when some sweeter early-season strawberry varieties flit onto the shelves, then they are snuffed out by the annual tedium of wall-to-wall Elsanta. For a tantalising week or so, Waitrose sold proper English celery, grown with earth mulched up around it to keep it pale and delicate, quite different from the ubiquitous lime-green fibrous stuff. But that, too, was gone in the blinking of an eye.
Is it any wonder that British consumers are so unenthusiastic about fruit and vegetables?
Joanna Blythman is a food journalism and author of Bad Food Britain.
I do wish supermarkets would stop treating us like children when it comes to buying fruit and vegetables. A case in point is M&S trying to flog us very expensive diminutive watercress designed to fit into a sandwich. So what's the problem with the already-small normal stuff, other than you can't charge so much for it ?
With the honourable exception of tomatoes, miniature this (turnips, avocados, courgettes,) and baby that (fennel, kiwis, melons, spuds) are superfluous, often idiotic gimmicks whose purpose is to add value for the retailer, not give consumers more genuine choice. The same can be said for all those packs of over-crowded, flaccid seedling salads growing on substrates. We all grew cress on blotting at primary school, but we've grown up now.
For decades we were stuck with one solitary variety of water-logged, hydroponic bell pepper. To stop terminal boredom setting in, and to give a faux impression of diversity, supermarkets sell them in traffic-light packs. They look cheery in an Early Learning Centre sort of way, but are useless from a cook's point of view. Apart from in the Middle East, where they feature in time-honoured recipes, green peppers are pretty much an under-ripe waste of space. Ditto their orange lookalikes. What cooks need is an affordable pack containing only red peppers, but supermarkets make you buy red peppers loose and pay more for them. I wonder why ?
The thinner-skinned, more flavoursome Romano pepper was a rare improvement. The next logical move would have been to introduce further botanical varieties of peppers, sun-grown outdoor ones or similar. But you can't teach an old dog new tricks, so, in a ghastly case of history repeating itself, Romano peppers are also being given the tri-colour treatment.
It's the same throughout the produce section. There's a frisson of excitement when some sweeter early-season strawberry varieties flit onto the shelves, then they are snuffed out by the annual tedium of wall-to-wall Elsanta. For a tantalising week or so, Waitrose sold proper English celery, grown with earth mulched up around it to keep it pale and delicate, quite different from the ubiquitous lime-green fibrous stuff. But that, too, was gone in the blinking of an eye.
Is it any wonder that British consumers are so unenthusiastic about fruit and vegetables?
Joanna Blythman is a food journalism and author of Bad Food Britain.
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