By: Blonde Two
The bigs news yesterday morning wasn’t some ridiculous shenanigans dreamt up by Trump or any other of the current batch of global leading odd-balls. No the news yesterday was much more important; the big supermarkets are running out of lettuces.
Can you imagine the disaster that is about to strike our nation. Prawn cocktails will be daubed flaccidly on our plates, burgers will sit forsaken in their buns and the mountain of ‘garnish’ that restaurants sweep into the bins every night will fade away to a hummock. On top of that we are all probably going to die of scurvy.
Except that it be like that won’t will it? The supermarket giants are in the process as we speak of importing a new lettuce glut (because have no doubt, many of these will be thrown away) from the USA. In 2014, 2 tonnes of container shipment travelling 5000 miles produced 150kg of CO2; now 2 tonnes of lettuces sounds like a lot but we do love chucking away that garnish. How ironic that the missing lettuces are called, ‘Iceberg’!
How long is it going to take us to remember that vegetables, like ‘everything’, have seasons. Even in my meagre, winter-sun starved garden I have found this week a couple of leeks and some kale. Leeks would be delicious, I am sure, with marie-rose sauce, nestled beneath a McDonald’s gherkin or next to our chips. What on earth have we come to?
My intense dislike of supermarkets grows.
“To everything there is a season…”
It was either God who said that or a chap called Pete Seeger.
That unvarying ubiquitous salad garnish plonked on the plate in pubs and so called restaurants demonstrates that proven working of the brain on auto-pilot in the background to perform the routine tasks of walking and the like without one’s awareness.
Surely as a chef the basic skill is to combine multiple tastes into a harmonious and pleasurable experience? So what does it say of their imagination when they present a boring salad garnish with your whitebait starter and exactly the same boring concoction with your “home made” lasagne main? No thought whatsoever has gone into creating interest by matching, and combining, flavours.
Lack of imagination will extend to your cheese and biscuits with a third cloned version if you get that far.
Eleven years ago I lost a lot of weight in order to be allowed to have my hip op. (All piled back on now but will have to start again if Worcestershire NHS will allow me a foot op!!!!!) When I was asked how I had managed to lose so much weight I replied that I had learned to love lettuce. Actually, I’s steeled myself to eat lettuce every time I craved chocolate. However, if it had been winter, it would have been celery that replaced lettuce, and I have an urge to eat celery in the winter months that is not forced upon me. Please tell me that celery is not going to be off our shelves this winter? B2’sGM
Strongly recommend organic watercress as a substitute for lettuce. Much better tang to it! (But leave some for me.) The vegetables that are going to be on the shelves will be the ones in season and the ones grown under glass – Spanish celery is on the list of ones likely to disappear from shelves, but it can probably be obtained from a different country.
Very glad to see that mine is not the only computer that has an apoplectic fit and leaps about when the apostrophe is used.
Watercress is among my favourites and much tastier than lettuce. In Norm’s paddocks in New Zealand, you can pick it wild.