Turnips vs. tomatoes: should salad crisis force UK shoppers back to their roots?

Britons should eat more seasonally amid national salad shortage, suggests environment secretary

Empty supermarket shelves
Tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers are in short supply on UK supermarket shelves
(Image credit: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images)

Britons should turn to turnips and other home-grown produce to get their vegetable fix, said the environment secretary, as a national salad shortage hit the nation’s supermarket shelves.

Lidl was the latest supermarket to limit the number of tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers customers could buy following a similar move by Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Aldi. The new rules were introduced after supplies across the supermarket sector were “hit by disrupted harvests in southern Europe and North Africa due to unseasonable weather”, said Reuters.

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 Sorcha Bradley is a writer at The Week and a regular on “The Week Unwrapped” podcast. She worked at The Week magazine for a year and a half before taking up her current role with the digital team, where she mostly covers UK current affairs and politics. Before joining The Week, Sorcha worked at slow-news start-up Tortoise Media. She has also written for Sky News, The Sunday Times, the London Evening Standard and Grazia magazine, among other publications. She has a master’s in newspaper journalism from City, University of London, where she specialised in political journalism.