I made a rediscovery last week: cucumbers can actually taste of something. After years of eating insipid, watery, condom-clad specimens from supermarkets, I had all but stopped buying them. That is, until my husband’s colleague gave us some from his allotment, and a childhood memory of snaffling cucumber sandwiches was suddenly reactivated. Fresh white bread, salted butter, pepper, cucumber: it’s a combination once so delicious Oscar Wilde made them a running joke in The Importance of Being Earnest.
And so to the story that children are struggling to name common vegetables, with less than a third of primary school-age children able to identify a courgette or a beetroot. This didn’t come as a surprise, really: what is there to get excited about when the taste is barely memorable? Supermarket courgettes suffer from a similar issue to cucumbers: they don’t taste of anything. Don’t even get me started on tomatoes. Many of us have become so wholly detached from our food’s origins that we are, for some reason, happy to accept this, as well as forgetting – and not passing on the knowledge – that fruit and veg comes from the trees and the earth.
