November of every year is a special time for bloggers to commemorate their art by dedicating themselves to publishing at least one post every day of the month. This can be quite a challenge for most bloggers, who often modify the rules and post every two or three days instead. Nevertheless, Wild Thyme and Sweet Pea will be following in the NaBloPoMo tradition with delicious new content by:
- Rigorously plucking new products from the bohemian orchard (otherwise known as the supermarket) to talk about,
- Editing upcoming recipes for publish with a fine-toothed cob of corn,
- Keeping all six senses aware of any food markets and festivals worth their weight in sea salt and finally,
- Filling our wicker basket with a variety of tips, tricks and anecdotes of interest to our readers.
Today’s plate will focus on the origins of your humble, dime-a-dozen peach and pear, cucumber and celery that we use in our cooking and healthy snacking everyday. We rarely (or perhaps have never) considered the arduous journey that these soldiers of soup and martyrs of minestrone must undertake before ultimately reaching your fork.
It occurred to me that if you were to ask me where my bag of green apples came from, I would probably stare at you for a good ten minutes with my eyes darting from side to side, eventually filling the awkward silence with “Umm…” and “Uhh….” before coming up with a clever response: “From the farmhand! You know, that person who wears overalls and gloves and picks with voracious pace?”.
Of course, all fruit and vegetables have their origins from the earth at some point in time, but it is of concern to the consumer-market to consider just how greatly the concept of “freshness” has been stretched thin by marketing ploys. It’s no longer a situation of produce leaving the farm to soon after becoming fabulous food – a new ‘F’ word has been inserted into the middle of the equation so surreptitiously, you’ve probably already forgotten you knew what it was…
Factory. Large corporations and supermarket chains spend vast amounts of money in product design and colour, so that they are not only appealing to the consumer, they also promise upon notions of extended shelf-life and freshness. In the shelf-life department, plastics and sprays and pesticides do deliver. But freshness? Who defines what is fresh these days and who defines what the opposite of fresh actually is?
After all, nobody would want to buy those cherubic cherry tomatoes if they were not coated in a shell of paraffin wax to keep them shiny and free of blemishes, nor would anybody wish to buy a bag of carrots that weren’t as tinted orange as the fruit itself. It turns out that the humble fruit and vegetables on display at your local supermarket are far more ‘experienced’ than we know.
In addition to the ‘ageing population’ of fruit and vegetables in stores, we also have the issue of delivery and collection. Millions of plastic bags are manufactured to courier these goods home, petrol is exhausted in dosages of outrageous sum to ensure delivery of produce is consistent across all parts of the world, the emissions of our cars to carry that weight to the market and home again and finally, the amount of electrical energy used on scanning and barcoding and warehousing items. It’s all a bit dizzying, really.
Supermarkets fulfill a wonderful desire in our soul to thrive off convenience, to leech every last minute of extra time to spend doing something else of relative importance. To many of us who rely on convenience for the sake of fulfilling other commitments (such as sedating a wailing child in the back of the shopping trolley), there is often very little choice we wield over the matter – convenience makes things simpler and requires less thought. But there are some of us who are simply uncaring and respond with, “Why bother boiling pasta when you can buy it in a shrink-wrap packet and microwave it?”.
Before you head for the shed and wield your mighty rake and hoe against your local shopping centre, consider this: what is your suggested way to feed the masses and keep up with supply and demand? Is it necessarily right that we ‘demonise’ modern methods or should we all move to ‘organic’ goods, which supposedly cut out the middle ‘F’ word and its associations of extended shelf life?
As a household that owns no car, we do our weekly shopping on foot, using ‘environmentally friendly’ green bags of woven PVC and are careful to purchase goods that use a minimal amount of packaging in their display. We are by no means purporting to be exemplary citizens of the supermarket. Rather it is in our weekly mission to make a small, unwavering point: if we can’t solve the problem of mass-production of goods and produce, let’s at least reduce some of the environmental impact by being conscious of what we consume. That way, less ends up polluting streams and filling up land-waste than what we need.
I’m all for bright and intensely interesting ideas, so if you have any views on the aforementioned, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment at the end of this post. Hopefully, I have both entertained and educated in my mission for less mileage on our fruit and veggies.
The Wild Thyme and Sweet Pea project found its roots when it was plucked excitedly from the garden, washed briskly in a basin of water and lovingly left out to dry in a soothing marinade of vision and ambition ... More »
The Food of Italy, Kay Halsey
The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, Odile Redon, Francoise Sabban & Silvano Serventi
The Silver Spoon, Phaidon Press
Jamie's Italy, Jamie Oliver
Italian Country Cooking, Loukie Werle
La Cocina de Mama: The Great Home Cooking of Spain, Penelope Casas