Hello we have no English tomatoes
It's still tomato season. Greengages are not unripe plums or gooseberries. Sugar plums. Bringing out the bean stringer.
All the tomatoes at my local supermarket come from The Netherlands. Every single one. At the market stall a few blocks away, the tomatoes are also Dutch, huge red globes on the vine (remember when tomatoes on the vine became ‘a thing’?) Others are unlabelled and anonymous. They could be English, Moroccan, Spanish, or Dutch. Probably Dutch because the Dutch produce most of the tomatoes we eat in the UK.
This is peak British tomato season and no-one in my neighbourhood can access British tomatoes on their doorstep unless they subscribe to a vegetable box, travel further afield, or grow their own. It’s just wrong. I might be exaggerating. There may be a grocers shop I’ve missed with a tray full of splendid specimens of English tomatoes but you get the gist. According to the British Tomato Growers Association, British growers currently produce around 70,000 tonnes. During the summer, this can be around half the tomatoes bought in supermarkets. The rest are mostly imported from elsewhere in the world (some 400,000 tonnes). Not only that, but the UK also exports tomatoes; to The Netherlands. In 2022, The United Kingdom exported $4.71M worth of tomatoes, whilst importing from Netherlands ($248M), Morocco ($202M), Spain ($123M), Belgium ($37.2M), and Poland ($18.5M). We really need to be growing more of the food we eat.
Further up the supermarket chain of superiority, and obviously far away from my neck of the woods, M&S and Waitrose have English tomatoes, of course they do, and naturally it’s still peak tomato season at your local farmers market. Why the Tomato Growers Association chooses the end of May for their British Tomato Fortnight is beyond my comprehension.
It’s a price war all round. If you’re on a budget you get what you can afford which is never as good and it’s an unfair state of play.
I’d love to know what you think, so do please comment at the end of this piece. Over at my community growing space, we’re still pruning our tomato vines and the magical smell of tomato leaves is one that I continually want to capture. We’re also busy picking runner beans which seem to expand in size overnight. Thank you
for the mention of that lovely bit of kitchen kit, the old fashioned bean stringer/slicer. I use mine every year and each time it reminds me of past Summer holidays, when we children would be put to work slicing up beans into long green tangles to be boiled and served with salt and butter.This is going to be a short piece today because time has caught up with me (I wasn’t running that fast, I can barely jog), and I need to plan and pack for a trip to France. Thank you dear friend Liz who phoned out of the blue to ask if I’d like to join her, so I could write about her local markets. Such a difficult decision to make. It means there will probably be no piece next week, but I look forward to buying Reine Claude (greengages) in France. If you’re wondering what a greengage is, I know, from various conversations on here that gages aren’t well known outside of the UK and France, although the Jefferson Gage was discovered in the USA back in 1830 and the famous Portuguese sugar plum, Elvas plums are made from greengages.
They’re a stone fruit, usually green or yellow, a small round plum variety, sweet and lusciously delicious. In the 16th century, Queen Claude, the wife of Francis 1, loved them so much that she had several trees planted at her Chateau in Blois in the Loire Valley, hence the French name, Reine Claude. Happily, I’ll be in the Loire area.
I’d like to give an honourable mention to
who amused me no end by quoting her friend who was ‘amazed and delighted to discover that greengages weren’t in fact a variant of GOOSEBERRIES.’ I’m working my way through the wonderful ‘gages I bought from Pippins Orchard at West Hampstead farmers market last Saturday, eking them out to make them last. I’m wary of people who want to stop me from eating greengages because they think I’m about to eat an unripe plum. Then there are people who’ve never seen a gooseberry before and assume it’s a hairy type of grape. Here’s India’s full article;
And finally, a shout out to
who are transitioning to Substack. I love what they do, standing up for small scale sustainable brands.I’ve recently been made a member of
; it’s as much of a joy to be included, as it is to be writing here.Thank you as ever for subscribing and following. If you like my writing, please do consider pledging your support, it means a lot to me.
It is bonkers. We grow and sell tomatoes and as yet have not found a market for all of them. I find it hard to understand why, as they are simply so superior to any supermarket grown ones. Of course they are more expensive but we price as low as we can. We are madly canning and preserving them and feel very lucky to have them!
I drive to this local organic Italian-run nursery to buy tomatoes that actually taste of something. I realise this is not something everyone has the resources to do. I am absolutely furious about that. My adult kids and grandkids eat pesticide sprayed poly tunnel grown cheap shitty tasteless tomatoes and I am boiling about that. USA and UK have the shittiest food cultures and dear God when will we act on that? https://www.instagram.com/foschininursery/?hl=en