Welcome to the ‘hungry gap’ – the time of year when salad days are months away, and there simply isn’t enough food. To confront this in 2023 forces a reckoning
I don’t even like tomatoes, especially, but I seemed to have nine in a paper bag, and had picked them up with my own hands – this detail will be important later. I had a couple of other things – a single onion and some herb that I could have just as easily stolen from a front garden – and my plan was to make salsa for assorted teenage fusspots, as well as tomato soup.
Fifteen quid? I thought the decimal point was in the wrong place. Then I thought it must be a language barrier, and “15” was Portuguese for £4.50.Baca juga:
I didn’t really want to interrogate the shopkeeper, who I know by name, though she doesn’t know my name, so there’s a world in which I could have just dropped the lot and run. Obviously, I couldn’t just get fewer tomatoes, because I had handled them all. But I had embarked on work to outsource to Doritos and Heinz at one seventh of the cost and a 70th of the time, and it felt mad, obscurely vain, like Marie Antoinette milking a goat on her fake farm, a spoilt pantomime of the simple life.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
