I am so fed up of a lack of food in shops.

[OutofEverything]

This has been going on for a few years but is only getting worse. I had to go to 3 supermarkets before I found some eggs. No lettuce at all, a few packs of salad tomatoes available in one supermarket, loads of empty spaces in the fruit and veg section, and in ASDA even the freezers had loads of empty spaces.

Before anyone says yes I know we will not starve, there is enough actual food. But a visit to a supermarket now is a lottery about what will be available and what is missing. And more and more I am having to visit multiple shops to get absolute basics.

Sainsburys yesterday had loads of empty space in the fruit and veg aisle, but the local independent fruit and veg shop was full of produce as normal, including plenty of tomatoes. They did say lots of people had been in and commenting about the lack of produce in Sainsburys.

What in your opinion is basic food?

To me, these are bread, milk, eggs, cheese, butter, fresh fruit and veg.

There is usually no shortage of those items in the supermarket. Just that I noticed when I was looking for red peppers, they didn't have any at that time.

Most of our veg comes from the veg delivery box, although we might supplement it with something from the supermarket every now and then, for a particular recipe.

A green agenda does feed the nation .. . When the bee population is decimated how will crops get pollinated? Maybe your brother can advise on the impacts of climate change on crops - extreme weather is impacting yields globally!!!

I shop at local Turkish supermarkets and Lidl, u haven’t seen an issue there. Going into the big supermarkets is a different story

The weather forecast is not reliable for a sub tropical island with mountains (snow on top recently) It will be 9c somewhere equally just been out in shorts and its about 22c it will get colder tonight but when the sun come up temp will drop. Its winter here but we still have bananas ripening.

Here is a link to a live webcam in Funchal its a bit cooler there today than here but its still 18c, check out what people are wearing. Its considered cold for locals and they will be the ones wearing coats.
www.madeira-web.com/en/webcams/ritzmadeira-livecam.html

I was really responding to people saying its the same all over Europe and that is not my experience.

I am not indeed and UK is currently officially involved in wars in Syria, Iraq etc and in 2021 legged it from Afganistan after decades of occupation there and of course unofficially in places like Ukraine.

To some degree this is confirmation bias i.e. you wouldn’t have noticed it before. I’ve noticed it with chicken and eggs and the tomatoes are a bit rubbish at the moment but that’s probably because it’s winter. I can’t say that I’ve noticed much else being different.

Pile of bollocks. If your brother can produce food without a huge wodge of tax payers money to make his farm profitable why doesn't he go and do it? Fact is he can't, hence the stewardship, which uses tax payers money to pay for green infrastructure that the country actually needs. Subsidising food production on unprofitable farms shouldn't be a thing. Better by far to concentrate the production of food on our best farming land.

It’s been interesting and a bit confusing where I am (London suburb).

Our local Sainsbury’s has been poorly stocked since the first covid outbreak. I don’t think the stock issues are all for the same reasons, though, as they are very different types of produce.

Fruit and veg aisles are regularly very sparse. Had been that way for a couple of years. (Brexit?)
Bread aisles always very sparse for at least a year.
Egg shortage has been on and off for months.
At Christmas, they had very little meat. The worst I’ve ever seen it, over the whole period.
Regularly sold out for weeks on specific products I like - organic semi skimmed milk, stirfry noodles, earl grey tea bags - when there never used to be obvious stock issues with these.

Aldi and Asda the same.

Local M&S and Waitrose are a bit better, but I notice they fill their shelves with the same two or three products on some aisles to make gaps in produce less noticeable.

None of it bothers me much personally, as it’s only mildly inconvenient. But it does throw up a lot of questions about our food security and the way we shop and eat.

How exactly does one hoard perishable items such as fruit and veg? What I have been able to buy (and this situation has been going on for far longer than the recent publicity would lead people to believe) has been of poor quality and goes off much sooner than it used to do. What we are experiencing is a perfect storm of high energy costs, labour shortages here, some bad weather in some of the countries and of course Brexit. As we are on longer in the EU we are right at the back of the queue when it comes to importing stuff. i have been noticing empry shelves and freezers at my local Asda for well over a year now. Many times I have come back from a shopping trip minus at least 4 times on my list and this is not a new situation.

I agree alongside meat and fish. What I can't get on a regular basis is eggs, various fruit and veg including traditional winter veg, whole chickens, sometimes little choice in milk.
These are basic ingredients. As I said ASDA freezers had loads of very empty spaces. I don't buy much frozen stuff so would not have noticed this if there had not been so much empty freezer space.

Has the brexit batshit signal gone off somewhere ? I see Clav has pasted in on wings of cuttings.

😂

'A green agenda does feed the nation .. . When the bee population is decimated how will crops get pollinated? Maybe your brother can advise on the impacts of climate change on crops - extreme weather is impacting yields globally!!!'

Thank you, and I stand corrected. Yet, it is practically possible to encourage pollination and to grow salad crops. For example, (I am simplifying again) a crop of lettuce, kept relatively pest free through biodiversity, surrounded by a border of balsam (which bees tend to love).

Yet, the restrictions on country stewardship do not allow for an adequate mix of conservation and cultivation, and, if the venture is to be profitable, we would still need people to pick and prepare the lettuce, and finding causal labour with the skill set and flexibility required is a problem.

I am not against Brexit in principle, but to remove ourselves from the Common Agricultural Policy and from the free movement of labour, without a well thought out domestic agricultural plan is bound to cause problems. I really believe this lack of foresight has contributed in part to some of the problems with supply that we are experiencing now, especially when it comes to fresh food.

@Lifeomars Yeah the stuff about hoarding is obviously bullshit. Big families may buy larger quantities of certain fruit and veg, but you really can't hoard this stuff. The person saying to pop it in the freezer has never tried to freeze lettuce, fresh tomatoes or cucumber, they will not freeze well. The only way you can hoard is by cooking up the veg and then freezing it and even that does not make sense. The tomatoes available are rarely good quality so far better to buy tinned tomatoes than buy fresh ones to cook and freeze. Also makes more sense to buy already frozen cauliflower and peppers than buy loads fresh and freeze.

No one is hoarding. There are shortages.

The UK is a low wage, low cost society. Low wages supported by the government allowing zero hours, poor minimum wage, and supporting part time work with a benefits system that meant working full time was not worth it for many.
It’s now becoming a low wage, high cost society due to inflation plus all the other factors many people have mentioned here. Plus a big dollop of government mismanagement.
But as long as everyone’s house was going up in value, you could pcp a new bmw for £300 a month, and debt=wealth in the eyes of many, the ‘nation’ was happy and felt rich.
What’s that got to do with the price of a lettuce I don’t know.

I use our local greengrocer. They had everything yesterday apart from tomatoes.

'Pile of bollocks. If your brother can produce food without a huge wodge of tax payers money to make his farm profitable why doesn't he go and do it? Fact is he can't, hence the stewardship, which uses tax payers money to pay for green infrastructure that the country actually needs. Subsidising food production on unprofitable farms shouldn't be a thing. Better by far to concentrate the production of food on our best farming land.'

Well, that is an opinion. However, as I posted above, it is possible, even on these poorer, smaller farms, to cultivate the green infrastructure and to produce food.

Yet, if we do have swathes of top grade farming land, ready to feed the nation, and we have the labour to prepare the produce, we should soon see an end to the supply problems discussed on this thread, shouldn't we?

The shelves are not as full as they once were but I haven't noticed any shortages. I did wince in Waitrose to see that a leg of lamb was only £2 less per kilo than a rib of fine beef.

I remember the days of seasonal fruit and veg and the joy of the first new potatoes and punnets of raspberries and strawberries, then peaches and gooseberries, followed by unctuous pears, and plums then the blackberries and elderberries. We have been spoilt in one way but not in another.

I haven't really noticed this in London OP but I do remember during the lockdowns, it was difficult to get so many items in supermarkets.

But this was where the small, local corner shops/newsagents really came into their own because they were often overlooked.

Do you have any shops like that, that you could try?

Planet Thanrt/Thanet Earth and energy costs/UK government policy.

Lidi had plenty of fruit and veg today when I done my shop even got eggs which have been hard toget lately they had a sign one pack off eggs per customer tho.

But this post isn’t being gleeful really is it? People are just tired of saying it and not being listened to. It’s true, it’s very probably only going to get worse and it’s disturbing how unengaged with it so many people are.

there’s so much terrible suffering going on that’s led to the current situation (Ukraine, bird flu, droughts etc) plus brexit of course which has caused untold damage as well.

the OP is understandably frustrated but if she were to take a step back and look at the situation, more broadly, she might be a bit more circumspect about it, it’s not like we’re on the front line of the worst of what’s going on and it’s not like it’s all just going to magically go away

I get our fruit and veg from a local market trader. Can order online and he delivers. He has milk and eggs as well. Bonus when you don't drive he says he he's not short of anything.

Thank you for your valuable input throughout the thread. I am sure you are an actual parent, not a Russian bot (who loves cucumbers).