I don’t even like tomatoes, especially, but I seemed to have nine in a paper bag, and had picked them up with my own hands – this detail will be important later. I had a couple of other things – a single onion and some herb that I could have just as easily stolen from a front garden – and my plan was to make salsa for assorted teenage fusspots, as well as tomato soup. Fifteen quid? I thought the decimal point was in the wrong place. Then I thought it must be a language barrier, and “15” was Portuguese for £4.50. I didn’t really want to interrogate the shopkeeper, who I know by name, though she doesn’t know my name, so there’s a world in which I could have just dropped the lot and run. Obviously, I couldn’t just get fewer tomatoes, because I had handled them all. But now I was embarked on work that I could have outsourced to Doritos and Heinz at one seventh of the cost and a 70th of the time, and it felt mad, obscurely vain, like Marie Antoinette milking a goat on her fake farm, a spoilt pantomime of the simple life.
I realise I’m not the only person to have noticed this, though I may be the first person to notice it only after I was locked in to a massive nine-tomato deal. Thérèse Coffey had already suggested we replace tomatoes with turnips, cue government cheerleaders suddenly full of enthusiasm for what we now call “winter salad” and previously called “coleslaw”. Restaurants have been experimenting with so-called white replacements on tomato-thirsty food, such as pizza and pasta, but the white is not turnip, it tends to be cheese. There is no known culinary circumstance in which tomatoes and turnips are interchangeable, no situation at all.
You can pick tomatoes for nothing on the banks of sewage plants, Mail Online pointed out helpfully. I actually knew that from a school trip to the Wandsworth sewage plant, and I even know why: it’s because tomato seeds pass through humans undigested, so, really, it’s impossible to stop them growing anywhere where digestive by-product proliferates. Were sweetcorn to germinate through its kernels, you would find a load of that on the banks of vomitoria. This was the 80s, before museums were free and primary schools didn’t have any money because teachers were too leftwing. Sewage processing counted as cultural enrichment, the perfect metaphor for that decade, which was, indeed, shit. But, saying that, I actually had a really fun time.
Welcome to the “hungry gap”, that period in the first flush of spring, when the brassicas have bolted, the salad days are months away and there isn’t enough food. Not much has changed agriculturally since the dawn of time. The UK is still a temperate oceanic climate, but the phrase feels pretty distant and nostalgic now – to be filed alongside “ration books”, “make-do-and-mend”, “hardy old campaigners”, and, for that matter, “austerity”: ideas and phrases that sound charming because they are way too long ago for their reality to need confronting. Meeting the hungry gap as a real thing, in 2023, forces a reckoning: it’s actually not very cute when tomatoes are more expensive, unit for unit, than oysters, and nobody can afford lettuce. It’s not life-threatening, let’s be real; none of us were using garnish as a major source of calories. But when the hungry gap is over, I’m definitely not going to miss it.
“I might just stop selling tomatoes,” Fatima said, as I ruefully completed the transaction. “It’s getting embarrassing.” “Oh, you shouldn’t be embarrassed,” I said. “Whoever’s fault it is, it’s not yours.”
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
