Shortage of tomatoes in the middle of February

[Stillcountingbeans]

Oh how my great-grandmother would have laughed!

www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/21/asda-morrisons-ration-tomatoes-peppers-fruit-shortages

Fresh: turnips, potatoes, carrots, cabbage homegrown chia sprouts or other sprouts.

Frozen, tinned, or home canned: most other fruit and veg that are not in season.
Perfectly survivable.

Oh god.

We've reached the "survivable" stage of things we have to put up with because of Brexit now, have we?

We are used to have tomatoes and whatnot all year round, but I also make wintery salads like rainbow colslaw, and bean salads. Tomatoes are nice to have but not essential to life.

I bet people get more now limits are in place, no need to panic about never having a tomato again.

Plus it sounds like Italy etc just spent more to keep stock. I reckon lower prices plus limiting bulk buying will be fine

Also round me it’s all prime agricultural land but companies are trying to turn tens of thousands of acres into solar panel farms. That won’t help us become self sufficient as a nation.

Afraid so.

The Tory party as just endorsed eating turnips as a way to survive.

Maybe they should have spoken to farmers months if not years ago. Does Coffey really think farmers can magically produce turnips out of their arses.

verdantverdure
Year round salad is part of our culture that most of us have grown up with
That's why everyone is so shocked at the empty shelves.
Because we've never had this before.

Never had this before?
We had something very similar in January/February 2017

2017 Losing the plot: courgette crisis spreads to other vegetables
British shoppers have been told that shortages of courgettes, aubergines and many salad ingredients, including lettuce and celery, will continue until spring –and that if they manage to find stock in their local supermarket they can expect to pay substantially higher prices.

www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/20/losing-the-plot-courgette-crisis-spreads-to-other-vegetables

2017 Retailers have blamed empty shelves on bad weather in Spain and Italy
[Jordi Vorderman, UK sales manager at Dutch vegetable supplier Valstar Holland] said some supermarkets were not prepared to buy courgettes at such high prices and would rather leave their shelves empty.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38666752

What is the 2017 vegetable shortage, which supermarkets are rationing lettuce and broccoli

www.thesun.co.uk/news/2774614/vegetable-shortage-2017-supermarkets-rationing-broccoli-lettuce-crisis/

2017 Broccoli, butternut squash, tomatoes, aubergines and courgettes have also been affected, as well as some citrus fruits including lemons and oranges.

www.express.co.uk/news/uk/762616/vegetable-shortage-crisis-fruit-lettuce-courgette-why-explained

verdantverdure
Oh god.
We've reached the "survivable" stage of things we have to put up with because of Brexit now, have we?

If you can't even remember what happened in 2017, you obviously recovered from the ordeal pretty well.

Do they really expect us to put a slice of turnip between two slices of bread for a salad sandwich?

Or do a lovely turnip garnish?

Well I can remember what happened in 2017 and it was a blip smaller than the current norm.

Brief shortages and slightly muddy broccoli was about it.

As opposed to shortages which have meant we never know what's going ro be available from one week to the next, or what it's going to cost.

Btw I can recommend pickled radishes. They grow easily and quickly. And are one of the first things you can get to maturity in the year.

Way way better than

I'm still giggling about turnips.

Don't laugh about the turnips, when they notice the lack of availability fodder beat will be suggested. We can garnish with dandelion and jack-in-the-hedge.

Fascinating thread. I run a food bank that receives a huge quantity of food industry “surplus”. This past week that included 200kg of Chilean blueberries, the week before a pallet of spinach (I think British, can’t recall now). The supply lines around food need a global reassessment imo - it’s February and a major supermarket got tonnes of south American blueberries here, having costed in their growing, harvest, transport etc. Only for them to be written off unsold.

I had hoped that that would’ve been a small benefit of the pandemic, but it doesn’t look like it.

It's a "I have to laugh or else I'd cry at the state of us" kind of thing.

All those unmowed grass verges must be edible, right?

@Liorae maybe they should have put that on the brexit leaflets? 'BREXIT - PERFECTLY SURVIVABLE'.

There are many things that should have been on the Brexit leaflets. There are also many things that should have been so obvious that they didn't need to be on a leaflet

I don't think tomatoes for only half the year qualifies as the "exact same benefits" does it?

We have so much food waste.

I don't blame the people who voted for Brexit got voting for an obvious fantasy @Liorae.

The people who manipulated them into it have been perfecting the art of targeting groups of people and pushing their buttons for quite a long time.

We should be angry with the manipulators and those who employed them, not their victims.

OK you lot, we were the thread that mentioned turnips first.
OWN UP WHICH ONE OF YOU IS MS COFFEY?

I met a friend yesterday who works for a fruit and veg importer. They say a lot of the problem us that there's produce readily available, but UK supermarkets won't pay the price that's being asked.

This is the issue. It’s why other posters are saying they have tomatoes etc but prices have gone up

Haha

An apropos historical parallel from Dan Snow:

Same with eggs.

Bird flu has had an effect but the real reason there's shortages is the supermarkets laughed in farmers faces 9 months ago when their input costs shot up.