Domestic goddess rating: 10% (working too hard to cook) Five-a-day: 4/5 Food miles: none unless you count the oranges – if you do, it’s 700 miles
On the menu: Toast & juice (breakfast); cheese sandwich and a couple of oranges (lunch); tunafish pasta (again) and salad (supper)
One of those days when I race out of the house as soon as the kids are in school and work my butt off until I come home just before suppertime. Luckily my ever-patient hubby was home, so we didn’t all starve.
I’ve been a bit flummoxed lately by the trouble I’ve been having finding seasonal produce. Maybe it’s only this time of year, but I’ve had to really hunt for it. The other day I went to three different shops just to track down some kale. And as for rhubarb… I can forgive the local grocer for not stocking it, as he tries hard but suffers badly from supermarket competition. But when I went over to Waitrose yesterday, I discovered that despite flagging up their rhubarb as “Cook’s Ingredient Seasonal Rhubarb” – it was shipped in from Holland.
How can they do this when there are rhubarb growers (you can read more about one of them here) working nineteen to the dozen in Yorkshire to provide succulent stems of forced rhubarb at this very moment? In its heyday, there were 200 growers in the Rhubarb triangle. Now there are just twelve. Unless they get buyers from somewhere, this is another seasonal food we’re perfectly capable of growing here (and alot better, many would say) but buy in from elsewhere.
They do say that rhubarb is enjoying something of a renaissance in the UK. But if supermarkets, grocers and other suppliers refuse to support our domestic industry and carry on shipping in the stuff from Holland, what chance has this centuries-old tradition got? No wonder nobody eats seasonally when they don’t know what they’ve got on their doorstep.
Personally, I wouldn’t touch Dutch rhubarb with a bargepole. I don’t often get all patriotic, but in this case I’ll stand up and be counted. It’s a British fruit. Let’s keep it British.
Filed under: Cooking, Seasonal eating, healthy eating, the politics of seasonal eating | Tagged: buying British, imports, rhubarb, rhubarb triangle, sourcing seasonal produce, supermarkets
[...] banging on about quite regularly since I started this – simply because I’ve been shocked at how little British food I’ve been able to find in the shops, even that which is in [...]