The great lettuce conspiracy
Deborah Ross celebrates the chip, which is not only cheaper than pre-packaged salad, but just as good for you The other day I bought a bag of salad from Marks & Spencer and then when I got home I looked at it and thought, ‘God, how stupid am I?’ Actually, I didn’t. I didn’t think anything about it at all until my partner looked up from his Sudoku, then looked at the bag as I was unpacking the shopping around him, and said, ‘God, how stupid are you?’ He then went back to his Sudoku, which he thinks makes him so clever but, of course, only really proves he’s an arse with too much time on his hands. Anyway, it wasn’t until a day or two later, when I came to open the bag, that I began to think he had a point, that maybe he wasn’t so dumb, as I did find myself asking, ‘Hang on, what have I actually bought here?’ I had bought, it turned out, 200g of iceberg lettuce — about ten chunks — for 99p. In the interests of groundbreaking research, which I will never do again, as it’s far too much bother, I returned to Marks & Spencer — I could have gone to my local greengrocer, which would have been much cheaper but not quite as fair — and bought a whole iceberg. It weighed 600g and cost 60p. This means, according to my partner, who is good at doing mathematical things, what with all the practice he puts in with Sudoku, a price hike of ... 500 per cent for the stuff in the bag. Five hundred per cent! OK, OK, they’ve washed it in chlorine and chopped it and put it in a bag, but I can do that. So I did. I washed the lettuce under the tap — there’s lots of scrumptious chlorine in London tap water — chopped it and put it in a plastic bag. It took me 49 seconds and it’s not as if I’m especially known for being quick or fit. In fact I find, these days, that I can’t even whip cream without having to take little rests.
Anyway, I leave this information with you as I wish to press on with an equally worrying concern: rocket. Or roquette, as it is sometimes fancily called. I returned to Marks yet again — see how bothersome this all this? — and bought a bag of rocket (wild). It cost £1.49 for 55g. Even I can work out this makes it nearly three quid per hundred grams or, if you like, £30 quid per kilo which, in turn, makes it more expensive than the best fillet steak (on average, £20 per kilo). I counted the leaves of rocket/roquette in the bag. There were 152 of these spiky bits of peppery nonsense. So it’s as good as 1p a leaf. And you know what? Rocket grows in my garden like a weed. I often spend whole Sundays either pulling it up or crossly stamping on it. The whole salad business is a racket. It may even be a rackette. God, how stupid am I? And you, judging by how much of it we buy.
The thing is, what with Jamie Oliver and his Turkey Twizzlers and that prig Morgan Spurlock with that Supersize Me business (if you eat any food exclusively for a month, you’re going to end up pretty sick), the demonisation of ‘junk’ and ‘fast’ food is such that what people appear to be forgetting is this: while you can be a fool at one end of the market, you can also be a bloody fool at the other. Capitalism, being as wicked as it is, doesn’t give a stuff who you are, and if it can exploit middle-class paranoia it will. As Tom Sanders, professor of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College, London, says, ‘Parents now think that if they put a little carton of Ribena in their children’s lunch box it will kill them. It won’t.’ He thinks the bagged lettuce rackette is such a triumph of marketing it is almost up there with bottled water. He wishes he’d thought of it.
Let me give you an example of the largely middle-class hysteria that now surrounds our food. The other week I went to a children’s party — nothing that special; I’ve put on better myself — when the proceedings were interrupted by a mother shouting, ‘No, Emily. No!’ Heavens, what was Emily up to? Had she lured Amelia into the garden to play eye surgeons, and was she about to operate with the bread knife and a bottle of Ajax? Oh, goody, I’d like a ticket for that. But, alas, no. The tea was pizza and chips and Emily had stuffed her mouth with chips. Emily’s mother made her spit them out into a serviette. ‘Is she allergic?’ I asked. ‘No,’ said her mother. ‘I just don’t want Emily eating food like that.’ She then took out a Tupperware container containing carrot and cucumber sticks and radishes. Emily was so thrilled she burst into tears. ‘So,’ I didn’t say to the mother, but should have, ‘what particular eating disorder do you have Emily in training for? Anorexia? Bulimia? Or haven’t you decided yet?’ I am working on a plan to abduct Emily and, if I don’t feed her on chips exclusively, then at least we shall have them for breakfast every day. And if there are any left over, we will have them for lunch, too. Not that there will be any left over. Chips are just too delicious and irresistible for that. In all the years I have bought bags of chips, I have never been able to get home without eating most of them. In all the years I have bought bags of salad, I have always been able to get home without eating any of it. Sometimes I have even got the salad home, put it in the fridge, and then thrown the whole slimy lot away a week later. This never happens with chips. Chips, you see, are really, really nice. That is why they are better than lollo rosso, as fetchingly frilly as it is.
Chips. If there is one last good, decent, true food left, it has to be chips. I love chips any way they come: fat, thin, medium. I like oven chips all right, and McDonald’s chips, but the best chips are the chips from the chippie, all hot and vinegary, floury and squashy, and eaten quick, quick, quick before the paper goes soggy and disintegrates. I could now bore you with a lot of facts about chips of the kind the British Potato Council is keen on promoting: a 179g portion of chips contains double the fibre, 75 times more folate and four times more vitamin C than an apple; and fish and chips has half the calories of your average curry etc., etc., and blah-blahblah. But here are some other facts about chips, most of which I’ve thought of just now, but which are no less valid for that: a) sometimes, which may be quite often, nothing else will do; b) I have never had to spend most of Sunday stamping on them or spraying them with weed-killer; c) they are, most heroically, neither processed nor exploitative.
I always get my chips from the Frying Pan on Hazelville Road, N19 (highly recommended). Here, my nice Turkish man, Mamet, sells 560g bags of chips for £1. He makes his chips from Maris Pipers, as 98 per cent of chip shops do. Maris Pipers are not the cheapest spuds. They cost 99.6p a kilo from Waitrose. Mamet has chopped the potatoes. Mamet has bought the oil in which they are fried. Mamet has bought the big fryer in which they are fried. Mamet has his premises to think of, and all the bills. Mamet has his own wages to think of. Mamet allows me free use of his salt and his vinegar and even his ketchup, should I want it. And do you know what Mamet’s mark-up is? Eighty-five per cent. Working on the same margin, that bag of iceberg should be 37p.
And chips aren’t bad for you. In fact, nothing is bad for you, as all food is good food so long as it’s eaten in the right amounts, even Turkey Twizzlers. (‘In fact,’ says Professor Sanders, ‘they are nutritionally rather sound.’) As for ‘fast’ food, what is bagged salad if not that? And what is Pret A Manger, for example, if it isn’t, as Professor Sanders says, ‘your politically correct McDonald’s. A sandwich from there actually, on average, contains more calories and fat than a burger and chips.’ OK, they won’t supersize you, but there are, he continues, ‘lots of chocolate treats at the till, and that’s not so different’. As for Ribena, an alternative ‘posh squash’ — like elderberry cordial, for example, which seems to be all the rage at present — it actually contains considerably more sugar and so on and so forth. Confusing? I should say so. But chips? You always know where you are with chips.
To be perfectly frank, I’m not quite sure what I’ve said in all this but, on a parting note, I will say this: if you bring me a lettuce I will not only wash and chop it and bag it for half of what the supermarkets would charge (a bargain, at a mark-up of only 250 per cent); I will also throw in some rocket for you to take home, possibly in a bin-liner, because that is the kind of generous person I am. I thank you. And I ask you to eat lots of chips, an honest food most honestly priced.
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