Turnips vs. tomatoes: should salad crisis force UK shoppers back to their roots?
Britons should turn to turnips and other home-grown produce to get their vegetable fix, said the environment secretary, as a national salad shortage hit the nation’s supermarket shelves.
Lidl was the latest supermarket to limit the number of tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers customers could buy following a similar move by Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Aldi. The new rules were introduced after supplies across the supermarket sector were “hit by disrupted harvests in southern Europe and North Africa due to unseasonable weather”, said Reuters.
Shortages could last up to a month, Environment Secretary Thérèse Coffey told parliament last week, as she urged Britons to “cherish” the UK’s produce “specialisms” and to eat more seasonally. “A lot of people would be eating turnips right now, rather than thinking necessarily about… lettuce and tomatoes,” she told MPs.
“But I’m conscious that consumers want a year-round choice and that is what our supermarkets, food producers and growers around the world are trying to satisfy,” she added.
‘A seasonal reality check’
Coffey’s suggestion that we look to turnips as a seasonal alternative to vegetables went down “as though she had suggested we browse on cattle cake,” said columnist Jane Shilling in The Telegraph.
But the humble turnip is “much maligned”. The “despised vegetable” even enjoyed “an 18th-century apotheosis”, said Shilling, “thanks to Charles, Second Viscount ‘Turnip’ Townshend, whose obsession eventually produced such elegant varieties as Orange Jelly”. And while turnips may not be the whole answer to shortages in our crisis-ridden food supply, “a second British agricultural revolution is long overdue”, said Shilling, “in which our native root vegetables have a role to play”.
The salad shortage may have provided Britons with a much-needed “reality check,” wrote Xanthe Clay in the same paper. “Our grandmothers wouldn’t have expected to eat lettuce and tomatoes in February, so why should we?”
Although the UK is “around 60% self-sufficient in food”, this time of year has always been “tricky”, said environmental reporters Helena Horton and Sarah Butler in The Guardian. The late winter months are known as the “hungry gap”, where the UK’s crops amount to little more than root vegetables and brassicas – hence our need to import fresh veg from Morocco and Spain, and leaving us open to the risks when bad weather impacts yield over there.
Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/uk-news/959914/turnips-vs-tomatoes-should-salad-crisis-force-uk-shoppers-back-to-their-roots