The precariousness of our food supplies.

[Rodo]

No shortage at all in our local Aldi, and our local Farm Shop has masses of veg of all kinds.

I really don't know what the papers are on about.

[medsec222]

Got what I wanted in my local Morrisons this morning. Did notice the absence of iceberg lettuce in the week. i suppose the shortage of veg makes a change from reading about Donald Trump.

[Suff]

There is some more detail about it here.

It is interesting that the paper does not go into why the imports from the US are so much more expensive. That would be because the EU has stiff agricultural import tariffs to prop up the totally insane Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

Last month the news was about aubergines and courgettes from southern Europe which had been decimated this winter. Lettuces and Broccoli are just slightly later.

The main problem is, as mentioned in the article, not that shoppers but the smaller businesses who can't get these veg from their normal suppliers. Simply they are going to the supermarkets and buying out the stock that you and I would buy. People in the food trade are finding that their veg and salad supplies are drying up or becoming cripplingly more expensive.

The interesting thing is that if we were already out of the EU it would not be so much of a problem. Still a security concern ongoing, but not so much of a problem.

[TheOstrich]

Well, fear ye not, I can advise that there are huge fields, acres even, of assorted spring greens maturing on top of Cranborne Chase and over into East Dorset as we speak. There will certainly be no shortage of cabbage this year.

[AliasAggers]

"The UK, with its growing population and reduced farmland, already imports nearly
50% of its food and will become particularly vulnerable - as today's situation shows.

That is a situation which we should be seriously tackling now. During World War 2 we
imported practically nothing, and we didn't starve, (although we never saw a banana!).
We should be now considering the possibility of growing more of our own food. An ample
vegetable diet would possibly solve the obesity problem and improve the nations' health.

[Suff]

During World War 2 we
imported practically nothing.

Not quite true.

As an island nation, the United Kingdom was highly dependent on imported goods. Britain required more than a million tons of imported material per week in order to be able to survive and fight

Without support from America we would have gone under around 1942. Those convoys brought food, ammunition and key ingredients for making our own ammunition.

Whilst it is true that we drove our land use and food growth to levels never seen before and whilst we had rationing; we would still have moved towards starvation without the convoys.

That was with less than 50m people and with a few million living off the land in other countries wherever they could whilst they were fighting the war.

Today, even with our modern agriculture, diesel powered farming implements (WWII was steam, horse or hand) and modern pesticides and fertilisers, we could never think of feeding ourselves even as well as we did in WWII. Even with rationing.

That is a security risk which is never mentioned.

[AliasAggers]

During World War 2 we
imported practically nothing.

Not quite true.

During the war years we were not aware that any vast amount of foodstuffs were being imported,
except for a few items from the USA. There was a great emphasis on increasing the yield from
farming: There were many Landgirls helping out, and there was even a civilian organisation called
the VLC (Voluntary Land Corp) where townsfolk helped out on the farms at evenings and weekends.
Farmers paid for their work, but all payments were donated to war-related charities. I spent many
hours at this work, as I was in a reserved occupation, and the only way I could join the armed forces
was to enrol as an RAF pilot. I couldn't do that, however, as one had to be medically Grade 1, and
I passed out at "Grade 2 (foot defects)". !!!

[TheOstrich]

Aggers, you may be interested to know that my mother was a Landgirl from Manchester and my father, I presume, was VLC (he was medically unfit to serve, but his war effort was as an ARP in Birmingham).
They met harvesting fruit on a farm in the Vale of Evesham and married just after the war ended ....

[AliasAggers]

Ossie_ I used to go to the Vale of Evesham for my holidays during the war, working on farms
and sleeping in round army tents. They were happy days.
Also, in my home town, I was a volunteer manning the ARP wardens Control Centre, so every
time the Air Raid sirens went, in he night, I had toturn out for duty.

[Suff]

Ossie_ I used to go to the Vale of Evesham for my holidays during the war, working on farms
and sleeping in round army tents. They were happy days.
Also, in my home town, I was a volunteer manning the ARP wardens Control Centre, so every
time the Air Raid sirens went, in he night, I had toturn out for duty.

There were a lot of things they chose not to tell us in the war Aggers. Kept from us for our own benefit. In most ways I guess they were right and, back then, people would have understood it much better.

My father was shipped out to the land during the Phony War, but as nothing turned into more nothing, he and his brothers came back into London. Once he’d come back, he was never sent away again. He tells me stories about living with the blitz. One of his more amusing one’s was about the V bombs. He was talking about how they would come over from time to time and there was, essentially, no real defence against them. People just had to take their chances. Until one nearly hit Fulham Town Hall. He told me, with a wry tone, that all of a sudden AA guns appeared on the roofs all around the town hall…

The war was a funny mix. My English grandfather was at the signing of the Japanese Surrender, he had a photograph of it. I wonder where it went.

To take this topic even more off topic, my Scottish grandfather was quite artistic and sent Airgraphs to my mother. I’ve put them in two powerpoint files as I could not change the orientation between portrait and landscape within one presentation.

The thing Mrs S, as a primary teacher, found interesting was slide 15. My mother was not yet 5.