The attractive-looking vegetable, which has become a staple in many chattering class households, has suffered due to the long, wet and cold winter.
Britain\’s biggest farmer of the vegetable said \”100 per cent\” of her winter crop had been wiped out and that there would be a severe shortage in supermarkets over the next few weeks, traditionally the peak season.
OK, purple sprouting broccoli is hardly an essential part of anyone\’s diet. But…
Sarah Pettit, who helps run Britain\’s biggest purple sprouting broccoli farm near Boston, Lincolnshire, told The Daily Telegraph: \”It has been the coldest winter on our farm for 50 years. It has been prolonged and at times it has hit -18C (0F) during the night.
\”Nobody could have predicted this. It\’s been terrible for winter vegetables.\” She said \”100 per cent\” of her crop was sitting in fields, rotting, after failing to sprout properly.
Neil Booley at Staples Vegetables, another major supermarket supplier, said that about half of all of Lincolnshire\’s crop, where about 45 per cent of the country\’s purple sprouting broccoli is grown, had been wiped out. The rest was about a month behind where it would usually be.
If we decide that we\’re going to get our food from one small geographic area (how small depends upon how seriously one takes localism and self-sufficiency) then we\’ve got to remember that floods and frost, torrential rains and droughts, these also affect specific small areas.
It simply isn\’t true that the entire globe gets hit by one or other of these each year: but it can indeed happen that the crops around any one town, or across any one county, can be wiped out by one or the other in any one year.
One could say that, well, OK so the Lincolnshire crop is screwed this year, but the people of Lincolnshire can just import food from Norfolk. And that\’s true, they can, precisely because we\’re not all self-sufficient. If we were all self-sufficient then Norfolk would only be growing the food for Norfolk: there wouldn\’t be any to ship to Lincolnshire.
There\’s much academic research showing the decline of famine in Europe since the turn of the first millennium. And it turns out that the best predictor of whether there is famine or not is not whether crops have failed or not: it\’s whether there are the transport links which make areas not self-sufficient in foodstuffs.
On another note it is reasonably amusing to to be able to see that the self-sufficiency thing only works as long as no one actually takes it seriously. Digging away at a quarter acre for your tatties is just fine: so is buying locally. But only as long as most food is still produced by specialists, in commercial quantities, wherever and then transported, so that the inevitable local failures can be covered.
If everywhere/everyone was self-sufficient then we really would be seeing localised famines each and every year. For there\’s always somewhere that has a crop failure and those who relied on that local crop for their food for the year would just be shit out of luck, wouldn\’t they?
Like so much of the Greenie mantra: it only works if almost no one actually does it.