I live in Wales, the symbolic home of the leek. It’s our national vegetable. So why is it that at our local supermarket, leeks cost £2.00 for 3? Eh, tell me! Vegetables are supposed to be cheap! Small Red Peppers are about 80p each, and don’t get me started on Broccoli!

Part of the problem is that there are now few other places to buy vegetables. I know of one traditional greengrocer’s shop in Aberystwyth, but they are now becoming a rarity. There is the odd farmer’s market and the occasional expensive whole food shop, but apart from that supermarkets have the market cornered. People go there, do a weekly shop to buy everything and that’s it.

Helen and I realised recently that most people simply don’t buy many vegetables and so don’t notice how expensive they are. They’ll buy potatoes to have with their meaty meal, a few carrots, some tins of peas and so on, but any other vegetables they buy will be small amounts to have with something else. For vegetarians like us, the vegetables ARE the meal and we eat a lot of them. Buying cauliflower, carrots, onions, leeks, broccoli, squash, peppers, sweet potatoes, swedes, sprouts and so on comes to quite a bit of money, especially if you buy organic

There are of course a few other factors in the price besides supermarket profits. There is the cost of transporting the vegetables from where they are grown to a central distribution warehouse, the packaging cost there, and then the further transportation cost to get them to the stores. A further price hike occurs if the vegetables are out of season, which means they have been refrigerated for a few months (with the environmental cost that this causes as well), and again if the vegetables have been brought from overseas. I saw some Kenyan carrots in the supermarket recently and didn’t buy them on principle. Why on earth are we shipping carrots from Kenya to Wales?

But there are more things you can do with fruit than just eat it. And get your minds out of the gutter please, I’m talking about art:

“Born in 1526 in Milan into a family of artists, Giuseppe Arcimboldo served as court painter to Habsburg emperors Maximilian II and Rudolf II, and is best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, birds etc.”

http://www.abcgallery.com/A/arcimboldo/arcimboldo13.JPG

http://www.abcgallery.com/A/arcimboldo/arcimboldo.html

If you can, please try to buy locally grown vegetables from a place other than a supermarket. They will probably be fresher and taste better, will most likely be cheaper, and since they have been transported a shorter distance be more environmentally friendly.

You will note that the photographed vegetable face above that is angry about the price of vegetables doesn’t contain any leeks. That’s because I was too tight to buy any!

Cheers, Tom.