THE COST OF A CABBAGE
By H. D. WALSTON
-W E have apparently become reconciled In the enormous cost of processing and marketing the food that we eat. It does not seem to worry us unduly that food for which the British farmer in pre-war days received approximately 250 million pounds cost the consumer in the neighbourhood of soo millions to buy in the shops. Occasionally, it is true, farmers grumble at the profiteering of the middlemen, but as a country we are still content to allow a system to continue whereby it costs us about as much to distribute food as it
• does in produce it. If we take specific examples, particularly among the perishable foods such as vegetables, the distributive margin is considerably above the average. For instance, a cabbage for which the farmer has received rid. will probably cost the housewife 6d., and even then that 6d. cabbage is not all fit to cat ; many of the outer leaves have to be discarded in the kitchen, and a good deal of the rest of it, because of its staleness, lack of flavour, and perhaps because of bad cooking, is left behind on the plate or on the dish. (Our method of cooking cabbage is so notoriously bad that an American diplomat in this country once said that the only way to get any water in an English restaurant was to order a dish of cabbage.) But it is no use simply saying that the farmers and market-gardeners grow bad-quality vegetables, that the middlemen make too big a profit, or that the cook does not know her job ; it is the whole system that is wrong and that must be reorganised if we are to reduce the cost of vegetables and improve the quality of the finished product.
Under the present system, when the cabbage is fit for cutting (cabbage is taken as symbolic of our vegetables, but the same argu- ments apply to most others), the farmer cuts the crop and loads it on to a lorry or on to rail. Usually this will take place some time after it is fit, since little, if any, incentive is given to the grower to
market his produce when it is young and tender, and he is, therefore, inclined to leave it till the quantity has increased at the expense of quality. After loading, it then passes out of his charge, and is delivered early the following morning to the wholesaler or com- mission agent in, say, Covent Garden. The cabbage has already been handled at least five times—once when it is cut in the field and put in the bag, then when the bag is loaded on to the cart, a third time when it is loaded on rail, a fourth time when it is unloaded at the terminus on to the delivery-lorry, and a fifth time when it is unloaded at Covent Garden. At Covent Garden it is bought by the greengrocer, on whose behalf it is loaded on to another vehicle (sixth handling), and unloaded in his own shop (seventh handling). If there happens to be a glut of that particular vegetable it may never get beyond the wholesaler at Covent Garden, in which case it must be disposed of as refuse, the grower receiving nothing but a bill for transport and wholesaler's charges. If it reaches the greengrocer it runs the same risk—he may not be able to sell it even at a reduced price, but if he does sell it there are still at least two more handlings before it finally gets into the consumer's kitchen. It is a very lucky cabbage indeed that gets there within less than twenty-four hours after being picked, and it may well be forty-eight hours or even longer before it finds itself in the saucepan.
That is the existing system ; that is why it is not surprising that distribution costs are high and that quality is low. So long as our main centres of consumption are many miles from the producing areas, the difficulties of vegetable-marketing can only be overcome by some process of preservation. The modern methods of quick- freezing already extensively practised in the United States seem to offer a satisfactory solution. By making use of this process small quick-freezing centres would be set up in suitable areas to deal with the produce of two to five thousand acres of vegetables. These would be grown on contract by the farmers, with a planned cropping, so that the inflow into the factory would be regular and the plant kept at work throughout the year. This system of growing on contract presents no difficulties, since it is a method already adopted successfully by canning factories both in this country and in the United States. The vegetables thus grown would then be harvested at the right time, bonuses being paid for high quality. They would be delivered by lorry direct into the factory and would be frozen within six hours of being picked. They would be prepared for cook- ing, thus saving the housewife a great deal of time and effort in her kitchen, and all waste products, such as pea-pods, Brussels-sprout stalks, and outer leaves of cabbages, would be dried and ground up into valuable cattle-feed. This should pay for most of the costs of preparation and would also bring about great saving in transport cost, since only the edible matter itself would be transported, and the rest left behind.
The frozen vegetables would be stored in large cold rooms at the processing factory, and sent out from there direct to the greengrocers once or twice a week. In this way there would be no wastage whatsoever, and a large part of the handling (necessary under the present system) would be avoided. Finally, the vegetables would be delivered in a fresh condition, so that the only reason for loss of flavour would be in the cooking itself. This could well be overcome by propaganda on the part of the processing factories, which could send out with each package recipes for good cooking. There are no technical reasons to prevent the vegetables actually being cooked before being frozen: all the housewife need then do would be to thaw the cooked vegetable and heat it. In this way even the handicaps of bad cooking might be overcome.
Thus it should be possible to reduce very materially the cost of vegetables to the consumer and at the same time to deliver them in a fresh, wholesome and palatable state. Equally important, they would be delivered in a condition which would reduce almost entirely the labour of preparing them, and thus encourage a far greater consumption. At the same time, valuable feeding-stuffs would be made available to the farmer at reasonable prices, and, most important of all from the farmer's point of view, he would be assured of a stable market at specified times of the year. This has obvious benefits over present haphazard marketing, whereby he may have to miss a period of high prices because no labour is available, and then find the crop left on his hands because the market has slumped.
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