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Posted by: Vicki on 09/08/2011

Where Bill enjoys his lovely imperfect carrots and a trip down memory lane

I recently pulled our first carrots out of the ground and was surprised and amused to find most of them wonderfully misshapen. My puerile smirks took me back to my childhood in front of the telly on a Sunday night when That’s Life with Esther Rantzen was the most popular programme on. Each week the cool and suave Cyril Fletcher would snigger from his high-backed winged armchair at the suggestive shapes of various root vegetables. Oh such innocent times!

It got the oldies in the office nostalgic, so if you fancy a trip down memory lane, watch this clip on YouTube. Our excuse was that our former intern and now regular contributor Alex Cater was in the office and was born around the time the series ended so we had to show him what we were talking about.

So when the sniggers had subsided, I washed and tasted the carrots and they were absolutely delicious: sweet, juicy and crunchy. It made me think of the thousands of tonnes of food that supermarkets reject because they aren’t “perfect” and that’s on top of all the food we throw away because we are enticed by multiple-buy offers that end up going off in our fridges and cupboards.

Thankfully there are organisations like FareShare which try to make use of “waste” food to feed the needy. And the soon-to-open People’s Supermarket in Stokes Croft in Bristol (find out more on Facebook by searching for The Stokes Croft People's Supermarket) will also sell misshapen fruit and veg at really cheap prices, much like the original People’s Supermarket in London is doing. You can read more about it on the Social Change page of the autumn issue of The Spark – out soon!

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