The Rise of Ugly Vegetables

The idea of growing your own fruit and vegetables is very appealing.

I can see why there has been a big upsurge in interest and demand for public allotments or, on a smaller scale, in a plot in your own back garden.

It is not a matter of achieving self sufficiency because that would entail putting a larger land area into cultivation but more the provenance of what you and your family eat.

Organic food has increased in supply on the supermarket shelves and has certainly improved in appearance. The first marketing drive for organically grown fruit and veg consisted of a few reluctantly promoted pick and mix displays of soil encrusted and, frankly, ugly fare and at a premium price which left consumers confused between doing their best to try to improve their dietary intake and keeping control of their budgets.

There will have been a steering group somewhere in the bowels of the AsTeCoSaMo Supermarket Corporate HQ presenting the results of a representative public consultation to the executives to the effect that organic is what the people want.

The Buyers for the conglomerate stores only like to deal with the large scale producers and can drive a hard bargain and contract for that producer to be on the prestigious preferred Supplier List. It is a hard decision for the hard pressed producers themselves to make. On the one hand they have a guaranteed end market for their labours but at a unit price representing the barest of profit, almost extortionate.

The problem faced by the Buyers in the early initiative to stock their stores with organic produce was that the new suppliers were mostly pretty small scale operations, a single farm or a specialist grower because of the qualifying criteria to attain that Organic labelling.

The standardisation in size, quality and visual appeal as demanded by the Supermarkets did not apply in the organic world because the fruit and veg grew as it felt naturally, could not be rushed and if growing conditions dictated a paler colour, coarser texture, wildly irregular shape and the retention of roots and foliage then so be it.

I was physically repelled by the sight of a rack of organic spuds in Sainsbury's. They were grubby, knobbly, the skin ruptured and fissured and above all the vegetable was indiscernible from the bucket of mud in which it was presented as though it had just been dumped on the doorstep by the farmer that very morning and shovelled into place in Aisle 2.

Sold on a weight basis smacked of a rip off to me but I considered it improper and embarrassing to be seen to chip off the excess soil and debris to shed the dead weight.

Many organic displays in the Corporates must have been seen as a bit of a gamble at first. Surely, the public would not go for downright disfigured goods. A few Executives championing the organic drive will have feared for their jobs and I expect that they kept the contents of their lofty offices in a cardboard box just in case the call came for them to be transferred to Logistics or Toiletries.

Fortunately for them but not for those afflicted were a few high profile and very publicised incidences of food contamination, criminally dodgy suppliers, TV cookery programmes featuring home grown fare and the embracing by the middle classes in particular of the organic ethic in a big way.

The average residential garden is not well suited to horticulture being, on a causal observation basis, either block paved or under timber decking. On the large housing estates of those tall and thin three storey town houses the density and orientation dictates that the sun struggles to penetrate onto flat ground.

The posher developments will actually have restrictions in the Deeds on use of gardens for cultivation or anything deemed inconsistent with the ethos of the developer. Experiments of an unauthorised nature with chickens in a coop at the bottom of an estate garden led to infestations of vermin and poor neighbourly relations on the basis of fears of salmonella and avian flu.

Modern philanthropists, Community Groups and Town Councils pushed for public allotments on waste land, undevelopable and therefore unprofitable sites or just plain nasty contaminated former industrial tracts.

In my local area the land on the outer rim of the By-Pass in two locations sprouted overnight with small green sheds, posts and wire mesh fences and had it not been for the absence of a look out tower and machine gun post many would have been right to assume that some form of detention centre was being constructed.

The activity on both allotment sites was phenomenal and within a few weeks the neat array of sheds and plots resembled a completely new settlement.

I feared for the images of the respective allotment donor towns given that the first impression for visitors and tourists would be a sprawling and  untidy mass of wood and polythene cloches, residents bent double or on hands and knees tending the young shoots and old chaps sat on deckchairs waiting for the beans to flower.

My pessimistic and cynical attitude shocked me to the core but then again I have been brought up in a Supermarket Culture where fruit and veg must be clean, of uniform colour for type, classic shape and without any evidence that it was actually pulled out of the soil, harvested from a field or otherwise exposed to the fresh, natural open environment.

I applaud these New Pioneers of urban organic food. The trek to the edge of town is a challenge in itself not withstanding that the intrepid allotment tenders have to do their business in full and plain sight of those driving along the By Pass. I wonder how the car borne voyeurs feel when they see the hard work and endeavours of the allotment people culminating in their holding aloft, proudly of the world's most expensively cultivated carrot or leek and soaking up the applause of their fellow grafters. They are probably comfortably smug in the knowledge that their car boot is stuffed full of fruit and veg, cheap, clean and plentiful from the Supermarket and they do not really care one fig from whence it came.