There are a lot of stupid things that supermarkets do to food that upset me. Wrapping cucumbers is of course everyone’s least favourite example of stupidity at work and washing potatoes counts as a close second. Washing carrots unnecessarily, so that the natural stuff that was stopping them drying out is taken off and then putting them in bags wet, so that a vegetable once preservable in the bottom of your fridge for months becomes instantly slimy and moldy is another. Wet things in unventilated bags: they go off. This is not exactly nuclear science, it’s just trufac and also a brilliant way of making slightly fermenting cow feed for the winter.
I spent ten minutes rooting through the bags of salad in Tesco last night, under some delusion that although the first 37 packets of Watercress, Rocket and Spinach that I found were obviously bruising and going that lovely, slimy translucent that green things do when kept underwater, so that a delicious compost aroma could accompany my poncy avocado salad, maybe the 38th would be fine. Inevitably, this delusion was crushed and I should’ve just bought the tiny, 80p box of pseudo-fancy organic, unwashed ‘field fresh’ rocket (PAYING MORE SO THAT THEY DO NOT WASH IT: I REST MY CASE, also salad in a box= cereal not condiment) but by that point I was upset, which is how I ended up with celery and biscuits and a slightly confused approach to my packed lunch today.
Are people buying this shit, though? I mean, are children being told that salad is something that should be sweated through polythene for a week and then belched into a ciabatta like a miniature ecological disaster? I realise I’m a middle class snob and that obviously being from the countryside has spoilered me as to the idea that vegetables might once have had an origin outside their hermetically sealed delivery membranes but is it too much to ask that my food isn’t going off before I’ve even accidentally left it at the back of the fridge for a fortnight?
The other question is, why are supermarkets trying to sell us silage? Tesco is the largest employer in the UK, it knows what it’s doing and in collaboration with Sainsburys and Morrisons doing the same, are we bedding in for the winter of our discontent etc. and being prepared for the composted mush that the airless metropolii of the future will feed us in polystyrene cups from squelching, chromed vending jets or are we being fed up to be put out to field when the machines take over? Moooo!