Breakfast is my favourite meal. A bowlful of berries (I'm greedy), two or three dollops of yoghurt and a sprinkling of crunchy cereal or muesli. Delish.
Raspberries are my favourite, but too expensive to eat on this scale. Blackberries are good at this time of year when you can pick them for nothing while walking the dog. (I love the way we all talk about walking the dog when what we mean is strolling along the footpaths while said animal charges through the crops, hedges and ditches, alarming rabbits, trampling the wheat and generally getting filthy).
Sorry, back to the berries.
So raspberries are too pricey, blackberries are free but very seasonal. That means the bowl usually plays host to blueberries and strawberries. These are almost invariably sourced (as the posh cooks say) from the supermarket. We go to Sainsbury's.
It's naughty, of course. We shouldn't be eating such fruit, destroying the planet with all those food miles and stuff. But I like them, so there.
We read a lot about supermarkets screwing growers down to rock-bottom on prices and forcing them to take the hit on special offers as in: "Great news, Farmer George! Your tomatoes are going to be on special offer this week. There'll be a huge rush, so you'd better produce lots and lots and lots of them....Oh, and by the way, since we're offering them at half price, we can only pay you half last week's rate, but you do understand, don't you...?"
The farmer is left to fill in the unspoken dots, which read: "If you don't like it, see if you can sell half a million tomatoes from a rickety table at the side of the road, especially when everyone has a glut in their greenhouse and is desperately trying to palm off the excess to colleagues with one hand while stirring the pan of green tomato chutney with the other."
Well, hard luck Farmer George. My heart goes out to you, but I fear my wallet goes to the supermarkets - especially when they've overestimated how much of something they're going to sell and have to start with the genuine discounts. Show me a pineapple with a yellow sticker and before you can say Justin King, I'll have a trolley full of grapes, melons, plums and nectarines as well.
The Co-op down the road is a great hunting ground for yellow stickers. Time it right, late in the evening, and you can pick up enough fruit and bread on the cusp of their sell-by dates to see you through the best part of a week.
OK, I'm a yellow sticker maniac. Some of it gets eaten, some of it goes rotten. Some goes to the chickens, some ends up as compost. I win some, I lose some. Mr King and Mr Co-op win every time. I don't begrudge them this victory, though. If I'm daft enough to buy more than I need, how is it their fault? With a yellow sticker you know where you are: This product may go off if you don't eat it this afternoon, and it probably won't taste very nice. It's pretty much telling you you're getting a bad deal.
I'm fine with that.
What troubles me are not the yellow stickers, but the red and white ones. The ones that tell us we're getting a jolly special deal.
I prefer the Co-op's strawberries to Sainsbury's. They are a paler red, for some reason don't get so bruised, don't go mouldy so quickly. I've been buying them for the best part of the past six months. You know where you are with the fruit and you know where you are with the price. It's always the same. A punnet costs £2. The strawberries come from all over the world - today's are from Hereford - but they are always £2. Sometimes you get two punnets for £3, but the single punnet remains £2.
This is convenient. But it is also strange.
Pardon me if I'm being old-fashioned, but I thought that fruit and vegetables were seasonal commodities. You pay more when the crop's been wiped out by a month's rain in a day, you pay less when there's a glut.This year's weather has been so higgledy piggledy with summer in March, autumn in June, spring in September, that you'd expect prices to be all over the place. But no. Week in, week out, the Co-op's strawberries have been £2 a punnet. Now I admit I haven't paid full attention to the weight every time, so it could be that more or fewer fruits are on offer from one week to the next. Today's punnet was 340g. You probably got 250g in February and 500g in June; the punnet size is unchanged and if you can't be bothered to read the small print to tell you what's inside, well - let the buyer beware.
As I say, it's nice to know where you stand.
As it happens, I stand - or rather am sitting - in the middle of strawberry-growing country: Essex.
For the past few weeks the Co-op has been selling local strawberries as well as the usual two-quid chappies. I'd expect to pay more for super-fresh support-your-local-grower prime produce. And I'd be right. They are £2.35.
So far so logical? But now we come to the thing that baffles me. The premium local strawberries have straightforward pricing; no offers, BOGOFFs, or mix-and-match deals. They are £2.35 per punnet and that's that. But those other ones on the lower shelves, the ones from Hereford or Honduras?
They not only always sell at the same price, but they are also always HALF PRICE.
This 'fact' is vouchsafed to the customer by way of a bright red sticker with white writing on it.
So I'm getting a great deal, then? Who cares about the poor farmer? Breakfast is sorted. Time to move on to the Prosecco aisle.
But hang on a minute. I though that if you wanted to tell a customer that something had been reduced, you had to have sold it at the higher price somewhere for at least 28 days. Is there some remote Scottish island where customers are constantly being charged top whack for everything so that southern shops can say their goods are 20, 30 or 50% off?.
And strawberries have quite a short season, don't they? The grower may not even be harvesting for 28 days, let alone harvesting, selling for a month and then harvesting and selling again at a discount. Where and when were 350g of Hereford strawbs being sold for £4 a pop? Did anyone buy them at that price? Or did they end up with yellow stickers in that Hebridean convenience store? Turns out I was wondering out loud, since the girl at the till responded '"I wouldn't pay £4 for them."
Let me say now that I'm not just getting at the Co-op. I haven't forgotten Mr King and his megastores: they have been known to use the same 'cut-price' approach to selling fruit and vegetables. And I daresay Sir Tesco, Mr Morrison, Mrs Waitrose and the rest have too.
How can there be such consistency in pricing? If you stretch your imagination hard enough, you might just concede that there could be a cartel fixing the prices of oil, air fares or washing powder, but surely not soft fruit? Secret meetings between growers, big and small, from five continents to agree that they will all charge exactly the same for a very perishable commodity that may be trundled down the road on an open truck or flown several thousand miles? Preposterous.
So maybe the supermarkets...? Perhaps it's best if we don't go there. Of course they just check each other's prices and cut theirs to match. They keep bragging that they do that, so it must be fine, mustn't it? They have our interests at heart.
Back at the Co-op, I'm still haunted by those pesky questions:
First: How can there be a 'normal' price for a seasonal fruit?
Second: If there is, who is the Lord of the Strawberry who sets that price?
Third: Do I go for the half-price run-of-the-mill Elsanta from the Midlands that should be £4, or the 'premium' local-grown fruit at 2.35?
And finally: Am I getting a bargain - or being taken for a fool?
I'd love to know what you think.
