Field Report- The Impossible Aisle
Darlings.
I went to a supermarket this week. Voluntarily, mes choux — no one forced me. I put on my best nonchalant expression (not difficult for a fox), slipped in through the loading bay, and made straight for the fruit and vegetable aisle.
And there it was. The miracle.
Everything. From everywhere. All the time. Apples from New Zealand. Avocados from Peru. Green beans from Kenya. Tomatoes from the Netherlands. And all of it gleaming under carefully designed lighting as if it had just tumbled off the tree that morning.
It hadn't, darlings. Not even close.
Take the tomato. Those perfectly round, perfectly red, perfectly uniform specimens that look like they were designed by committee? Picked green. Hard, unripe, flavourless. Shipped across a continent in a refrigerated lorry and then taken to a warehouse where the doors were sealed and the room flooded with ethylene gas until they obediently turned red. Not ripe, mes choux. Just red. The colour of ripeness without any of the substance. Like a spray tan for fruit.
And then there is the apple. The humble, glossy, suspiciously perfect supermarket apple. Picked unripe, sprayed with a chemical called SmartFresh to halt the ripening process, coated in petroleum-based wax to make it shine, and then stored in a cold room for up to twelve months. A year, darlings. The apple you pick up in June may have been on a tree in the southern hemisphere last July. Chemically frozen in time, waxed like a showroom car, and sold to you as 'fresh'. I have known younger antiques.
But here is where it gets truly sinister. Because they don't just gas the fruit.
They gas the meat.
That bright red mince in its plastic tray? The steak that looks so vivid, so vital, so alive under the fluorescent lights? It is sitting in what the industry calls 'modified atmosphere packaging' — the oxygen inside the pack has been flushed out and replaced with a cocktail of nitrogen and carbon dioxide to keep the meat looking red long after it would naturally have turned brown. It is not fresher, darlings. It is not better. It is wearing makeup. The colour is a lie, and the lie is designed to stop you noticing that this meat was processed, packed, and shipped days — sometimes weeks — before you put it in your trolley.
Now.
I am a fox who has travelled, mes choux. I once spent a long and somewhat disreputable weekend with Anthony Bourdain in a back-alley kitchen in Lyon, during which that great man taught me two things.
The first was how to deglaze a pan with Cognac without setting fire to one's brush.
The second — and he was very firm about this, darlings — was that food should not need to lie to you. 'If it has to pretend to be something it isn't,' he said, jabbing a wooden spoon in my direction, 'walk away.' He then scribbled something in his notebook about a fox in a kitchen and the adventures one might have between meals — but that, mes choux, is a tale for another day.
So what does a fox do?
A fox eats what's real. A fox buys from people who picked it this week, not people who gassed it last winter. A fox reads the label and asks: how far has this travelled, and what was done to it along the way? And if nobody can answer — a fox walks away.
It is June. The land is bursting. Stop buying the impossible aisle and start eating what is actually, gloriously, right outside your door.
Toodle pip.
R.
PS — I did ask the supermarket's 'Fresh Produce Manager' whether the tomatoes were gas-ripened. He looked at me as though I'd asked him to explain quantum physics, which — given my time at CERN in the summer of '97 — I am actually rather well qualified to discuss. But I digress.
