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       11 Permanent global summertime

      A Briton born a hundred years ago, resurrected and propelled around the typical modern supermarket, would be astounded at the staggering choice that’s on offer. Entering via the fruit and vegetable aisle, he or she might even conclude that his children’s children live in a latter-day Garden of Eden. How else would you explain that eye-catching cornucopia? Modern consumers who actually eat the stuff, however, are less impressed.

      In 2002, an article I wrote for the Guardian ‘Weekend’ entitled ‘Strange Fruit’, attacking the quality of supermarket fruit and vegetables, received an unusually large, impassioned and supportive postbag. One Cambridgeshire reader wrote in referring to the ‘gastronomical tyranny’ of the supermarket fruit and vegetable shelves. ‘The supermarkets’ dumbing down of our taste experience isn’t just confined to selecting varieties with longest shelf life and least flavour,’ he continued and went on to relate a personal taste experiment. ‘Last week I compared a Victoria plum from our garden with one bought from Sainsbury’s. One was full of flavour and a succulent mouthful, the other tasteless pap. You can guess which was which,’ he wrote. A reader from Gloucestershire yearned for produce that ‘tasted good as well as looked good’. A London reader was angered by a supermarket spokesman quoted in the article who had insisted that consumers were happy with their offering. ‘He needs to know,’ she wrote, ‘that people are not happy with what they are getting and that we don’t want “freshly prepared lines to fit modern lifestyles”. We want seasonal produce with flavour. It’s time to boycott supermarket produce and refamiliarise ourselves with our local greengrocers,’ she concluded.

      Increasingly, people have become disenchanted with supermarket produce. One reason is that it is predicated on a new nature-defying order where every conceivable fruit and vegetable grown anywhere is available all the time. I named it ‘permanent global summertime’ (PGST). Supermarkets’ pursuit of PGST means that they cannot be open with customers. In January, for example, a knowledgeable greengrocer would know that there are no peaches to be had anywhere in the world that are worth eating by the time they arrive in the UK and would simply stop stocking them. In May, confronted with a customer seeking parsnips, he might gently suggest that they were out of season and suggest a more appropriate alternative. But supermarkets don’t have this option because such candour would give the lie to the dream they peddle in which it is both feasible, and indeed reasonable, for the UK shopper to expect virtually every horticultural product on the planet every day.

      Supermarkets promote this artificial reality because they know that fruit and vegetables are a ‘destination category’: in other words, they form an initial impression that can clinch a consumer’s choice of store or might even persuade them to switch stores. The produce section is attractive window dressing for everything else from washing powder to custard creams. It gives chains an opportunity to differentiate themselves from one another. If you have a fruit or vegetable ‘exclusive’, your whole chain seems more interesting to the consumer. The more unusual or rare, the more environmentally right-on, the better. As a Sainsbury’s buyer pointed out, ‘Adams Pearmain [a traditional English apple variety] offers a genuine point of difference.’ Supermarkets would hate us to get the idea that one chain is very much like another. So to enhance the impression of astounding choice throughout their stores, they stock as many different types of fruit and vegetables as possible.

      PGST may look good, but in the name of consumer choice and public health the irregularity and diversity that is part of the natural order has been eliminated, not to benefit consumers but to fit the way our big food retailers like to do business. In essence, this way means sourcing vast quantities of easy-to-retail, long shelf-life standard varieties, grown to rigid size and cosmetic specifications, that can be supplied 365 days a year. ‘Quality in supermarket terms means a constant supply of produce that matches their stereotype in terms of shape, size and colour,’ one packer told me. ‘It must have acceptable sugar and pressure levels and mustn’t taste actively unpleasant. Hi-tech, low-taste, odour-free produce is the norm.’

      That is why supermarkets have made produce shopping a routine, uninspiring experience, effectively turning shoppers into robotic Stepford Wives, loading up their trolleys each week with identikit purchases. No wonder the nation’s fruit and vegetable consumption is declining. Eating ‘five a day’ is indeed a daunting and unrewarding mission if you shop in a supermarket selling Midwich Cuckoo-style produce. And in practical terms, by fostering the concept of the one-stop, weekly shop, supermarkets have drastically reduced the opportunities we have to purchase fruit and vegetables of any kind. Many consumers have simply given up buying pricey items such as plums, strawberries, peaches and apricots entirely because they are such a dismal let-down. The frisson of excitement that true seasonality provides, and the appetite-whetting response it should generate, are absent. Inspiration is shrivelled, for example, by the stultifying knowledge that whether it’s March, July or November, you will always find grapes in the middle of gondola three, on aisle number two, and they will always be Thomson Seedless. As food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall put it, ‘The downside of the culture of infinite year round choice is a kind of options paralysis: there’s so much on offer you don’t know where to start. Understanding the seasons brings a sense of structure, rhythm and rightness to your shopping and cooking. In a world where the methods of food production are rapidly unravelling into madness, seasonality is sanity, offering the best and quickest solution to the never-ending question: what shall I cook today?’ Shoppers no longer see onetime supermarket novelty breakthroughs such as iceberg lettuce, fine green beans, baby corn and mangetouts as a welcome relief from the limitations of native seasonal vegetables. Instead their ubiquity has made them perpetual clichés, a larger-than-life reminder of supermarkets’ obsession with creating a new agricultural world order where the sun always shines. When Sainsbury’s canvassed shoppers in its prestige Cromwell Road store in London as to what they most wanted from a supermarket, they put their fingers very accurately on our supermarkets’ shortcomings. They said they wanted ‘very fresh produce, in season, that reawakened their interest in food’; in other words, the opposite of what they usually get from supermarkets, which is unripe, low-risk, far-travelled unseasonal produce that deadens any instinct to cook.

      Chef Dennis Cotter astutely summed up consumers’ alienation with supermarket fruit and vegetables as follows:

      Peaches, tomatoes, avocados, asparagus, broad beans, sugar snap peas, parsnips, leeks, aubergines, sweet peppers, apples, pears … these are extraordinary foods that can give us unique pleasure. Ironically, the more poor imitations we eat, the less pleasure we take. For many of us, the pleasure associated with these wonderful foods has been gradually replaced in our minds by a dull, nagging ordinariness bordering on disappointment, and ultimately we forget they were ever wonderful. When the foods have finally been reduced to ordinariness, we can pass them in the supermarket aisles without even noticing them.

      The problem isn’t just the never-changing produce that is on the shelves but what ought to be there yet strangely isn’t. Our fellow Europeans expect that the lion’s share of produce in their shops and markets will be home produce, coming from identifiable native regions, or at least sold under a generic national label. In Italy, you’ll see produce marked ‘nostrano’ – literally ‘local’, a point of fact, but also a statement of pride, evidence of a country with a thriving horticulture. The French use the tag ‘pays’ in the same way. To visiting European nationals, accustomed to buying overwhelmingly their own country’s produce and only a small proportion of imported lines, UK supermarket shelves must seem positively outlandish. Bizarrely, it is actually easier these days to buy a tropical passion fruit in a British supermarket than it is to buy an English apple. Friends

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