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where's the fresh food gone?


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Has anyone else been experiencing difficulty getting fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and fish in London? On Monday Ocado was quite literally cleaned out of all stock. My local M &S has had bare shelves all week and even the local Sainsbury's is empty. I appreciate that the holidays may have caused a few delays but even today I found nothing available. What's going on?

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Prices for a lot of seafood spike at this time of year - I would guess supermarkets aren't p[repared to face the magin erosion by paying higher prices!

If a man makes a statement and a woman is not around to witness it, is he still wrong?

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Make the most of it and stop buying fresh food from supermarkets, it's a sign I tell you, a sign!

Surely January has been the low point of the British produce year throughout history. Most of our ancestors would have been reduced to salt fish, smoked meat and dried pulses by this point in the year.

I have little truck with supermarkets but empty shelves at this point might be interpreted as evidence that they are going laudably seasonal.

If the root cellar is empty why not venture a little further into the store and see if you can't locate the bacon flitches, the badger hams, the stockfish cabinet and the pease pudding aisle. :biggrin:

Tim Hayward

"Anyone who wants to write about food would do well to stay away from

similes and metaphors, because if you're not careful, expressions like

'light as a feather' make their way into your sentences and then where are you?"

Nora Ephron

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Funnily enough I'm eating salt haddock and pulses tonight :)

I really doubt that the empty shelves are due to a lack of seasonal produce, as stocks of Israeli tomatoes are as low as Yorkshire cauliflowers in Harrogate Waitrose today, I visited purely for research purposes you see.

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Make the most of it and stop buying fresh food from supermarkets, it's a sign I tell you, a sign!

If only it were that easy...

I can recommend Abel and Cole for vegetable box deliveries. Good, responsive customer service, friendly delivery drivers, and they let you give them a list of things that they should never bring you (e.g. cucumber, ugh). They also deliver meat, fish, and various storecupboard bits and bobs.

Edited to add: before I worked from home full-time, I got them to deliver our box to work. Had to carry it home, but it was still preferable to using a supermarket. They coped pretty well with delivering to my office some weeks and to the house others.

Edited by Kake (log)
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Make the most of it and stop buying fresh food from supermarkets, it's a sign I tell you, a sign!

exactly!

transport reduces significantly over the holiday period, especially from across the channel. if you add the fact that retailers are reticent to maintain high stock levels after christmas due to the dramatic drop in sales of food between 24-31 Dec, then you end up with practically no fresh produce making it to market.

-che

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  • 8 months later...

Regarding local/independently sourced produce vs Supermarket produce, the book Shopped is an amazingly convincing piece of work, which has made me want to stop shopping at supermarkets altogether, mainly because it says food bought locally or independently taste lots better. I am struggling to find mentioned on this site, where is good for getting independent food producers to deliver to my door.

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Well you could start with an veg box delivery, but from there supermarkets are the people to distribute a lot of the things you might want to buy easily. Delis will sell a lot (oils, rice, pasta etc), obviously butchers and fishmongers.

Interesting side note, as this thread was mainly active around january. I have a friend who manages the fresh produce section of a waitrose, and he had been warned of the major shortage of fruit/veg (particularly onions) because of the 2007 weather. A lot of crop was spoilt at that time, necessitating imports, but this was limited as more was needed to be brought in, which just simply wasnt there (i.e. we were ordering 200% our usual from other countries, and they didn't have the extra 100% of produce to send our way.)

Edited by CalumC (log)
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