Rain, frost and snow in Spain have resulted in a shortage of courgettes, broccoli and iceberg lettuce. Prices have surged, and supermarkets are now rationing the scarcest produce. The biggest danger, apparently, is that owners of independent sandwich shops will buy all the iceberg lettuce, leaving the middle classes of the UK with nothing to garnish their ostentatiously transparent chill drawers, and nothing pleasingly green to place on the children’s plates (so that one can sigh meaningfully when it’s time to scrape it, and half a bottle of Pizza Express house dressing, into the indoors food waste caddy).
The pain doesn’t stop there. Oh, no: much more of this and the outdoors food waste recycling bin may start to become embarrassingly lacking in heft. No one wants to be thought of as the sort of bastard who doesn’t recycle their food waste, the sort who has an old mattress in the front “garden” and a never-used food waste recycling bin languishing under the hedge where it got blown two winters ago. Well, except the people who obviously don’t mind at all, because that’s exactly what their front “garden” is like. They’ll be EU migrants, probably. They should bugger off back to Spain and fix the weather, don’t you think?
And it’s not like you can bulk up food waste recycling bins with “mainly in the plain” jokes. If this continues, no one will be able to look their refuse collector in the eye. Or no one would be able to, had we all not got into the habit of failing to look him in the eye back when we turned about four. They’re EU immigrants, probably. They can stay.
On the upside, no courgettes. Now the spiraliser has no excuse for throwing those sad, reproachful looks it has thrown all day, every day, since eight days after it was purchased. Although, that’s not much consolation, given that all the spiralisers were rammed into the back of the Why Did We Buy This? cupboard ages ago, and still they manage to throw that look.
In London, everyone knows that the Why Did We Buy This? cupboards collectively account for around £800bn in cubic residential property space. (Warning: alternative fact. Possibly.)
What would Marie Antoinette do? I keep asking myself. She’d probably tell us to Google “recipes for winter greens”, which is pretty much the same as saying “Let them eat kale”. Even she, were she alive today, would know better than to declare “Buy tinned peas” (which, surely, we all stocked up on anyway, as soon as Trump because president).
I weep when I think of how we gave all those brussels sprouts to that group of guinea pigs, not six weeks ago. I knew that was a mistake, every one of those eight times I watched the viral YouTube video of the rodents eating them.
Still, there are blessings – and I’m counting them. No one in Britain is in Spain, being told that their seasonal work at minimum wage on a zero-hours contract has not materialised. We are saving this experience for the world as we will know it post-Brexit.
Then, when we have finally taken control in this area, as in many others, we will be able to fly all our iceberg lettuce direct from the US all the time, import tariffs and weather permitting. That is really happening at the moment, just so that the supermarkets don’t have to disappoint their customers by revealing to us that the success of crops is somewhat connected to weather. Who knew?
God, humans are absurd. Why do we persist in flying planes full of lettuce to Britain, when you can munch on tasty British lettuce to your heart’s content from May until October? How can it be said to be a consumer crisis when this piece of ridiculous foolishness “goes wrong”? I liked it in the good old days, when salad was for summer, spaghetti hoops were for winter, and oranges were for half-time at netball.
Who really thinks that supermarket fruit and vegetables are nice anyway? Who buys the horrible peaches? Who falls for the practical joke that is supermarket plums? Who doesn’t know that iceberg lettuce is just water in disguise? Well, all right, it has a tiny bit of vitamin K, but not nearly as much as cabbage or kale or leeks; you know, vegetables available really cheaply and in season, in Britain, right now. Not as much as dried herbs or chilli powder: chilli powder has much more vitamin K than iceberg lettuce. There, I’ve said it. Chilli powder is fine.
Let them stop fretting about vegetables denied by the weather and eat chilli powder. Just explain to them that they really shouldn’t think about spiralising it, because that doesn’t work.
