No Shallots Anywhere
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Dear Diary,
It’s been more than three weeks since my last shallot.
I’m not trying to be dramatic, but very dramatic things are happening. There are no shallots anywhere!
We are, for the ???? time, experiencing some supply chain issues here on Blighty. This time, it’s due to what the papers are calling the “Pingdemic,” wherein food system workers are being constantly “pinged”—alerted by the NHS contact tracing app that they’ve been exposed to coronavirus and need to isolate.
Now, I’m not an epidemiologist, but I’m pretty sure that’s actually just still the “Pandemic,” and we don’t need a new word for it. But, because everything is bad 100% of the time, the takeaway has been that it’s the app that’s bad, not the working conditions in which the people responsible for feeding us are constantly being exposed to deadly conditions. So naturally, Boris Johnson announced that essential workers still have to go to work, ping be damned.
Which is Smart and Good, if you ask me.
Sainsbury’s, my Sunday supermarket, has said that ping-related disruptions should be minimal. And that’s largely true. I can generally find what I need.
Except shallots.
The way things generally work at UK supermarkets, which I quite like, is that roughly 90% of the items are store brand, like a Trader Joe’s situation but with the quirkiness turned down to a 2. The produce is all generic, with a little blank space for specific information on its origin. So Sainsbury’s or Tesco might contract with a dozen different farms across the country, but they’re all sold in the same bag.
Most of the shallots here come from one farm in Norfolk, an Eastern coastal county of England. I don’t know what’s specifically going on with them, as they have absolutely no digital footprint, but I really hope everything is OK.
My greengrocer has made it through the last year pretty much unscathed. He has some sort of alternate supply chain for each of his dozens of fruits and vegetables that I honestly think have been worked out over years of Guys being Dudes. His shallots are big and beautiful, but lately they’ve been moldy.
They come from Mexico and Southern California, and if you remember last year’s moldy shallot situation, you understand my fear.
But last year, I was able to skirt the moldy supermarket shallots with trips to the farmers market.
So I thought, surely I could do the same here. There’s a large market not far from me that operates most days of the week! Easy fix. Not quite. UK farmers markets are a little … different? Like they’re actually basically greengrocer stalls. The produce is nice, but it’s from Spain or Italy or a mélange of wherever. Farmers aren’t really part of the equation; farms have their own shops sometimes but they’re like, where the farm is, not within walking distance of my house or an iced coffee proprietor.
I’m getting very tired of relying on a food system that wasn’t set up to actually feed me, or to protect the people whose labor underpins it.
But self-sustenance is hard as hell. I feel like a dolt buying cilantro wrapped in plastic after a crop of my own is taken by snails, or supermarket tomatoes when mine sit, almost ripe, just begging me to be patient for another week or two.
I spent a few hours this weekend thinking about what it would take to become shallot sovereign. I don’t have any more space in my garden beds, so I found myself being like, OK Rebecca, what if you grow shallots on your roof? And you know, what if I do? Is that illegal?
More importantly, what will my landlord think?
It’s nice in a sort of structural sense that my produce packets have a little note on them that tells me where my food is from. But god I miss the actual, interpersonal knowing that comes from a real farmers market. I miss fruit and vegetables that come from West Virginia and far-flung Maryland. It is possibly uncouth to mention the guys at the Spring Valley Orchard tent but I miss them too. I yearn for the previous twenty four years of living where I didn’t know what a polytunnel was.
I just want to slice a shallot and a few cloves of garlic and dump a whole carton of Sungolds into a hot pan.
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