The vegetables are Revolting

A brassica writes:

Dear British Public,  

We’ve put up with a lot from you down the ages.  Remember the Carême years?  You try standing out when you’re sitting next to a piece of boned and rolled Angus all shiny with veal reduction, and you’re set in aspic.  Then there was all that post-war abuse – the dehydrating in the Vesta factories and the boiling to death in domestic kitchens.   That really sullied our reputation overseas.  And let’s not mention that recent episode at M&S when we were dressed up like foolish lapdogs in glossy cardboard sleeves and told to change our name to ‘steaks’…  

You leave us rotting in Lincolnshire fields while you chase those flimsy Spanish Iceberg lettuces and the aviation-fuel divas from Egypt and Kenya, and still we put up with your grey skies and cold, hard soils year on year without complaining. 

But this time you’ve gone too far. We refuse to be used as weapons with which pugilistic members of the chattering classes can score cheap points in the court of public opinion. 

“When you get trapped in the disadvantaged cycle, the concept of middle-class logic doesn’t work.  What you see is parents who aren’t even thinking about five fruit and veg a day, they’re thinking about enough food for the day,”  [Jamie Oliver] told The Times…”If you can only buy crap, you only eat crap.  And if only crap is discounted and Bogof’d [buy one get one free] that’s what we tend to sway to.”  Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said:  “The anti-obesity crusade is largely a patronising upper middle-class reform movement.  There is a huge element of food snobbery involved, which is why it is so appealing to celebrity chefs.” From The Times, March 5th, 2018:  https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jamie-oliver-obese-poor-think-in-a-different-gear-bc5lrt8qf

Food snobbery?  We British vegetables are not pricey.  We are not difficult to cook.  We are packed with vital nutrients.  We can be used to make hundreds of cheap, quick, simple, delicious, healthy meals.  Cooked with flair and respect, as we are in plenty of regions around the world, and yes, in parts which experience levels of poverty greater than any this country knows, we are fit to grace the tables of sultans.  It’s time to show us some love.  

Signed:  the edible bulbs, roots, tubers, leaves and buds of Britain.

Mel Barrett
Monday 5 March 2017