The huge number of different types of single vegetables or fruit that are available in France when compared with the UK is often highlighted by food writers and cooks but that doesn’t lessen the impact of this in reality. We have visited four markets in the first week of our French vacation and have seen an amazing variety of produce.
This diversity seems most marked in tomatoes. We have seen at least a dozen markedly different varieties on market stalls. Last night we prepared a salad with four different varieties – medium-sized red round tomatoes, medium-sized yellow round ones, elongated red tomatoes with a pronounced point at the end, and very photogenic large orangey red tomatoes with a yellowy green star radiating out from the stem. All of them tasted different. The yellow ones were a little disappointing with a rather bland but the large striped tomatoes were as spectacular in taste as appearance with a huge burst of flavour that was sweet enough to justify tomatoes’ classification as fruit.
Most other produce is available in a similar diversity. Peaches can be yellow or white, round or flat. Lettuce can be green or red, straight-leaved or frizzy. Courgettes can be green or yellow, elongated or round. It makes shopping at the markets, cooking and eating food so much more interesting and rewarding.
The paucity of choice in the UK can be explained by a number of reasons. In French markets the stallholders are often the producers and so there will be representation of a large numbers of growers in a single market. Most produce grows well in Southern France so there will be little need to import any, it can be harvested and sold in the same day so storage and preservation is not an issue. In the UK there are a growing number of farmers’ markets where there is a greater diversity of produce but they are still not an everyday source of fruit and vegetables as the markets are in most of France. The majority of fruit and vegetables eaten in the UK is purchased at supermarkets run by a small number of companies. The variety of produce is slowly increasing in British supermarkets. It is now relatively common to find plum-shaped as well as round cherry tomatoes. Waitrose are expanding their range of produce and are including sections of seasonal regionally-grown fruit and vegetables. We even found stripy Marmande tomatoes in Waitrose last summer, though at a price ten times higher than on French markets. However most supermarkets still present an almost monocultural face of produce with virtually no choice for a single type of fruit or vegetable.
Could supermarkets change this without substantial increases in prices? We are no experts on food distribution or storage but it doesn’t seem unreasonable that a large tomato producer could grow two different varieties instead of one with only minimal increases in costs, only when the number of varieties increased to a point where specific extra deliveries were needed would transport costs increase. We look forward the regular appearance of irregularly shaped stripy tomatoes in British supermarkets.
Food Matters 