Supermarkets Hit By Plant Power Shortage
It’s Plant Power Day! Typically this would be celebrated by eating plant-based food but that might be a struggle this year with the ongoing shortages.
Shops like Tesco and Aldi have limited sales of some vegetables such as cucumbers and tomatoes to one per customer after extreme weather impacted imports.
Empty shelves in Lidl
Supermarkets say sights like these are linked to shrunken exports from North Africa and Spain caused by poor weather conditions. Additionally, Some farmers are struggling to pay for greenhouse upkeep due to increasing energy bills.
Last year, the National Farmers Union said those who use glasshouses were looking at a drop of up to 50% in the amount they could afford to grow due to the price of heating.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says that despite the current supply issues, ‘The UK has a highly resilient food chain and is well equipped to deal with disruption.’
The Lea Valley Growers Association (LVGA) has 80 members and has said the ‘majority of tomatoes, peppers and aubergines are not going to be around in big volumes until May’.
This was in response to Environment Secretary, Thérèse Coffey, commenting that these shortages would be resolved in a month.
But one Coventry cafe says that there’s something to learn from this crisis.
Chris Woodward is the cafe coordinator and chef at The Pod Cafe. He says that this veg crisis is a wake-up call to return to seasonal fruit and veg.
“We see this as an opportunity to ask whether we should be buying overseas all year round. This is a chance to encourage people to learn about growing their own food.”
“We’re integrated with an allotment space with the food union. In the summer we aim to grow half of the vegetables we serve so we’re quite fortunate in some ways with combatting the rising costs.“
“We’ve been struggling to serve one of our dishes that has tomatoes in it but we change our menu every week so we’re lucky in that way,” Chris added.
In the winter months the UK imports around 95 per cent of its tomatoes with most of them being imported from North Africa and Spain according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC).
Despite the closure of Dirty Kitch late last year, another vegan eatery in Coventry, Chris says that there’s still an appetite for plant-based food in the area.
“We’ve been open for ten years and have been serving only plant-based food for six. It’s the accessibility of it, we can serve people of all religions. Some people come and they’ve never had plant-based food before.”
Plant Power Day was started by Alpro in 2018, it aims to encourage people to ‘take plants off the side-lines and make them the headliner of any meal’ every March 7th.
Alpro milk used at The Pod Café
Appinio research found that in 2021, 63.5 per cent of Britons bought vegan food items. The analysis also discovered that over half of Great Britain’s meat eaters are willing to replace some of their meat intake with plant-based substitutes.
Would you ever go vegan? Let us know!