Where were you during the great vegetable war of 2023?

Bought any carrots recently? As founders of Eat Seasonably, we very much hope you have (they should be at their best right now). And were you surprised by just how cheap they were? With a vegetable price war raging, last month most of the supermarkets were selling big 800g bags of carrots for only 15p.

At first glance, 15p carrots are a great idea. After a year of rocketing food prices, who wouldn’t want all that veggie goodness at a fraction of the usual cost? As I dug out my peeler and opened my own budget bag, however, I started to wonder.

As it happens, I spent much of 2023 working with our friends at WRAP, exploring how we can persuade more people to buy their fruit and veg loose. Not only does this reduce plastic, there is also strong evidence to show that going unpackaged reduces food waste by helping shoppers buy only what they need. Doing this can make a real dent in fruit and vegetable waste — currently binned more than any other food type in the UK.

My 800g bag turned out to be the perfect illustration of this. The carrots themselves were small, split and a bit limp. They didn’t taste of much. Had corners been cut to get my carrots to me quite so cheaply? We can extrapolate from Sustain’s fascinating ‘Unpicking Food Prices’ report that the growing and distribution costs alone for my bag of carrots would amount to 34p. So someone is taking a haircut (and I’m not referring to the carrots, none of which had the lovely green bushy tops you might see in a farmer’s market). And, at 15p, who cares if some get thrown in the bin? I eked mine out over a couple of weeks, eventually grating the last one into a spag bol. But I’m not sure many others would have bothered.

So if we are to move to a new world of loose fruit and veg — which now looks increasingly likely — I’d suggest that we need to work much harder to ensure that the smaller quantities sold are eaten and, dare I say it, enjoyed.

There’s something dispiriting about uniform rows of plastic wrapped produce. They are hardly designed to encourage a new generation to love their greens. Yet, if you’ve ever been to a market in France (or even a decent Morrisons) you’ll know that unpacked fruit and veg, in all their knobbly majesty, can be a thing of beauty. Moving away from big bags of lowest common denominator produce means we can genuinely savour the choice in the produce aisle and pick the most delicious looking specimens of carrot-kind.

So let’s take advantage of this coming change to re-invigorate the British public’s broken relationship with vegetables. Let’s celebrate eating and enjoying fruit and veg, not just buying them at a discount. And if we possibly can, let’s stop throwing them in the bin too.