UK supermarkets run out of turnips

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/supermarkets-turnips-food-shortages-rations-b2288919.html

by jjgreen • 3 years ago

41 61 3 years ago

independent.co.uk

dom96• 3 years ago

after Tory minister tells Brits to eat them to avoid shortages

wow, didn't realise Therese Coffey had such sway on the British public. Presumably most of these turnips are just being thrown out and not actually eaten.

b800h10• 3 years ago

I suspect this entire story is probably down to one shop running out of turnips and someone tweeting a photo of it.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 3 years ago

It seems to be just Tesco's and Waitrose, and the information seems to come exclusively from an online search.

Quarrelsome• 3 years ago

might be possible that given the restrictions now placed on purchasing certain vegetables shoppers are seeking alternatives, irrespective of what Tory MPs may or may not say.

mnd999• 3 years ago

It’s possible they were buying them to throw at Therese Coffey.

rcme3• 3 years ago

I've been hearing about the UK food shortage recently, so I was curious to see what the cause was. A Google Search turned up this article from over two months ago warning that the UK would face a food shortage without government assistance: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/uk-shortages-eggs-water-m...

The direct cause of the food shortage is still unclear to me, but it was interesting to see that this issue was known about months beforehand.

mynameisvlad• 3 years ago

The article mentions

High temperatures and a lack of rain, followed by a period of cold weather, are being blamed for creating the “most difficult season ever,” Tim Casey, chairman of the Leek Growers Association, said.
Suppliers have warned that shortages could last weeks as a combination of bad weather and transport problems in Africa and Europe has left some fruit and vegetables out of stock.

b800h10• 3 years ago

Oh, don't let that get in the way of a good anti-Brexit story! Come on, man!

rcme3• 3 years ago

Interestingly, none of those reasons were listed in this article from December which seems to have perfectly predicted the current shortage. The article from December made it seem like farmers were squeezed by rising costs of labor, fertilizer, and other inputs and were facing buyers unwilling to budge on the price. So their only option was to reduce output.

cameronh90• 3 years ago

I've been hearing about a UK food shortage recently too. However, living in the UK, I've not seen any evidence of it so far. Some things are out of stock sometimes, but that's reasonably normal.

Never underestimate the capacity of our media to blow something up beyond all proportion. I don't doubt that supply is a bit lower than normal, but it's not like we're about to resort to cannibalism here.

b112• 3 years ago

Paid stories are a thing. A very common thing.

So is the desire to raise food prices, as seen by 50% food increase pricing on many things, in a year with 8% inflation (Canada).

"Taking advantage of", class 101.

Semaphor• 3 years ago

I read the Brexit subreddit for entertainment, last time there was a shortage, it seemed to be very regional. One place, people would post pictures of empty shelves, another everything would be normal.

fivefifty2• 3 years ago

The Harrys Farm youtube channel explains it fairly basically in this video, I'll try and link direct to about where he talks about it specifically (although whole thing might be worth watching if you're interested in how farming works in the UK) https://youtu.be/b6m29rSSmCM?t=552

For those who can't watch the video, basically the gist is most of the food in shortage (lettuce, tomato, cucumbers etc) is normally grown in the UK in large greenhouses from local producers, but energy prices got too high last year making it uneconomical to grow in a greenhouse as obviously it's energy intensive to do so. The govt refused any support and supermarkets rejected the potential higher prices and instead decided they could just source product overseas instead. The greenhouse producers therefore didn't plant much for this season, but the foreign sourced produce also had a poor harvest which resulted in no excess available for export to the UK and therefore some stores now can't stock some fresh produce. Energy prices have come down and so local UK produce growers are now growing again and should be back to normal supply in a couple of months. Although he mentions earlier in the video that this years wheat crop is doing poorly and that is normally used as animal feed which could mean potential future shortages for things like meat and eggs.

hanoz2• 3 years ago

A comical new addition to the general impression that Britain is falling apart at the seams.

skippyboxedhero5• 3 years ago

Not really. I went to my fruit guy in one of the areas that the media said has no supply...everything in stock.

He spoke to his suppliers and supermarkets just won't pay the higher prices. The supply is there though. He had a full range of salad products.

The UK buys a lot of produce from NL (which is a huge exporter of tomatoes and other greenhouse-grown produce), they have been selling in Europe at the higher prices that factor in higher electricity cost, UK supermarkets have stopped buying from them because it would mean having to increase prices.

And finally, UK producers chose not to produce at all this winter because they believed that UK supermarkets wouldn't offer a price that made production profitable...they were right.

This kind of thing happens because, for multiple reasons, there is an obsession with providing very low food prices. UK supermarkets achieve this (the prices for vegetables are comically low here, still...my Tesco had a sale on potatoes the other week, 20p/kg...how? How is this possible? Farmers here get absolutely abused) but the result is that sometimes they don't have anything.

It has been happening with eggs, milk, meat (most UK supermarkets just don't get quality meat anymore, even their premium ranges of top cuts of beef are shoe leather), vegetables...and, of course, all anyone can talk about is the declinist nonsense rather than look at how fucked the food supply chain is.

droopyEyelids• 3 years ago

Could a screwed up supply chain for food be a symptom of decline?

lispm• 3 years ago

‘If they have no bread, let them eat cake’!

ploppyploppy• 3 years ago

100% this. Thank you for the nuanced response.

My village general shop has all fruit & veg as normal. This shortage is a media obsession.

hanoz2• 3 years ago

how fucked the food supply chain is

Oh great, and there's me thinking it was only an amusingly trivial contribution to the nation's woes. Now I've got this whole calamity to worry about.

And by the way, the idea that supermarket meat is inedible is absurd. A fillet or sirloin from Tesco, and I'm sure others, is perfectly delicious.

blibble• 3 years ago

if you want an accurate picture of Britain: maybe the Russian oligarch owned independent isn't the best source

Veen2• 3 years ago

I've just been to my local farm shop (I live in a rural area of the UK). Lots of turnips, leeks, potatoes, and other vegetables readily available. I suspect that the humble turnip, having fallen out of fashion, isn't bought in huge numbers by the supermarkets. A small uptick in demand may have accounted for their entire supply.

talideon3• 3 years ago

It's not all that long ago that they were threatening to starve Ireland because of the negotiations around the border.

Plenty of food here right now! The only thing we have an issue with is tomatoes, and local tomatoes are about to come into season.

b800h10• 3 years ago

Weds 22nd Feb: "Irish Examiner: Shortage of fruit and vegetables 'a wake-up call' on impact of climate change"

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41076908.html

Tue 21st Feb "Irish Times: Supply of vegetables to Ireland disrupted by poor weather and energy costs"

https://www.irishtimes.com/food/2023/02/21/supply-of-vegetab...

talideon3• 3 years ago

Yup! Hence my mention of tomatoes, which is the main place where I've seen any disruption. I'm not saying that there's no disruption here, but Ireland is a lot more food secure than the UK. Our shortages are relatively minor compared to the UK, which is what makes their earlier attempts to threaten us with food shortages somewhat funny.

skipants• 3 years ago

Tory colleague Selaine Saxby said supermarkets are importing “far too many products”

Yikes -- do the Tories not have any economists at their disposal or do they just choose not to listen to them?

skippyboxedhero5• 3 years ago

This is 100% true.

We rely very heavily on imports in winter. The majority of this stuff can be grown in the UK but isn't because UK supermarkets are obsessed with lower prices. We need more onshore production and higher prices.

If you look at tomatoes, we actually had some domestic production but these places chose not to grow this winter knowing that supermarkets wouldn't pay the higher price. So they rely heavily on places like Morocco and Kenya that can offer lower prices, and sometimes that doesn't work out.

I had a friend whose family ran one of the largest potato farms in the UK. They stopped working with supermarkets in the 90s because it was so horrendous (Tesco notoriously used to do multi-hour contract negotiations with farmers, they would deliberately not give them seats so they had to stand for the whole thing and turn the heat up in the room without giving them water, they also had specialist negotiators who were notoriously abusive...this is how the largest supermarket behaves), they did food service, and then they went into food manufacturing. It was the only way to retain margins (many of the largest food groups in the UK came out of farms that needed to keep moving up the supply chain because of pressure from supermarkets).

HDThoreaun• 3 years ago

Supermarkets obsessing over lower prices is a good thing actually. Cheap food is like the first things societies need to be functional. Sucks for farmers, but the rest of us are eating good because of the work the markets put in.

benj1112• 3 years ago

No tomatoes in 2 supermarkets today.

The egg section has seemed quite Soviet for quite a while. Now the veg aisle is getting the same way.

nivenkos• 3 years ago

But the prices are incredibly low.

When I came back to Sweden, here we don't have a tomato shortage, but the price has gone up to about 9 GBP per kg - so not much difference in reality.

benj1112• 3 years ago

I thought this was a Brexit thing. Evidently not.

lonelyasacloud• 3 years ago

Shortages in eggs and chicken are mainly down to precautions around trying to contain the spread of avian influenza.

i-use-nixos-btw• 3 years ago

Well, that’s Baldrick’s cunning plan out of the window then.

UK supermarkets run out of turnips

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