The salad shortage focused attention on the failures of our 24/7 dietary culture. But it also provides a chance to rethink the way we eat fresh fruit, veg and green leaves
I’m afraid the lettuce shortage was just the tip of the iceberg. We may have run low on salad leaves but, more worryingly, we were low on empathy for poor southern Spain where flash floods followed by snow wrecked the crop. Our relentless consumer-rights focus meant that the emphasis was clearly on “weather-related supply challenges”, supermarket speak for “My God, we are running out of salad!” Sustaining a dietary culture of 24/7 access to all fresh fruit and veg in all seasons was never going to be easy.
A packed salad uses at least 10 times more energy than a local lettuce