Salad Days

In Great Britain, we're running out of things to call a 'crisis.'

Room in New York by Edward Hopper (1932)

Back when our culture enjoyed a level of seriousness, the columnist Franklin P. Adams challenged Dorothy Parker to conjure a witticism using the word, ‘horticulture.’

Her offering: ‘You can lead a horticulture, but you cannot make her think.’

This week in anti-serious Great Britain, we’re indulging our seventh crisis across six months. This crisis is horticultural.

From record inflation to the war in Ukraine to stultifying energy prices, and not to mention our political musical chairs, Great Britain shifts from one crisis to the next.

‘Britain’s salad crisis could last another month,’ explained the austere Reuters.

On social media, British miserabilists plaster newsfeeds with woebegone photos of supermarket shelves emptied of lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. Some call it Vegxit.

At least the tabloids are having a Turkish. With customary British irreverence and compulsory British insistence, the tabloids take the piss. To outsiders, nothing is more delicious than those who fall from artificial grace. To Brits, nothing is more delicious than our own falling from artificial grace.

The Daily Star excels in these clownish times.

“What do we want?’ screamed one front page. ‘VEG!’ ‘When do we want it?! NOW!’

For lucky readers, the Daily Star offered twelve packets of vegetable seeds.

Lamenting the Great Fruit and Veg shortage, The Metro fabled the tale of a woman whom supermarket workers stopped from bilking a one-hundred cucumber loot: ‘Seize Her Salad,’ bellowed the front page.

A mordant cynic would suggest a nation one-third of which is clinically obese has long languished in a salad crisis.

Sensing opportunity, amateur entrepreneurs known disparagingly as ‘drug dealers’ dropped their three pills for a tenner for three tomatoes for a tenner. I’m told their middle-class customers demand not Coke but artichoke. Perhaps this is that green economy The Guardian bores keep waffling on about.

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Environment minister Therese Coffey last week endured heavy shelling for suggesting Brits renounce regal tomatoes and ducal cucumbers for humble turnips.

“It’s important to make sure that we cherish the specialisms that we have in this country,” she said.

Ms Coffey employs ‘specialism’ in that word’s starkest of definitions. The turnip is a British specialism much like executing apostates is a Saudi specialism.

For the unacquainted, the turnip is the vegetable equivalent of a religious fanatic wearing sackcloth to punish themselves for their sins. Indeed, one could argue the creator made turnips so ugly and so awful to deter humans from eating them.

According to the Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, to ‘give someone turnips’ (v.) was to turn down a proposal of marriage or love, or to ‘abandon or jilt especially heartlessly or ruthlessly.’

The Romans knew better. Roman citizens used to launch turnips at those they didn’t like.

Some time in our prelapsarian descent, someone mistook that hateful little vegetable for an edible foodstuff.

Reader, it is for a good reason nobody on this island has willingly eaten a turnip since the Germans were buzzing Messerschmitts over London skies.

The mere thought of subjecting my digestive system to a turnip conjures mental distortions of The Blitz, polio, cholera, and all those lovely nostalgias over which the faintly alive reminisce.

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Ironically, ‘turnip’ is proletarian slang for a stupid, dull, or foolish person.

Such hairshirt theatre is a hangover from the pandemic. Back then, renunciates took it upon themselves to ensure all were equally miserable. Since then, the turnip’s human form—the pandemic puritan—has craved and conjured continuous crises.

And yet, the final tenet of Covidian faith dissolved over the weekend into the soup of reality. This revelation threads a string of other revealed truths.

First, came the news that lockdowns did more harm than good. Second, came the news that mask mandates had approximately zero effect. Third, that natural immunity is indeed a thing. And fourth, that Covid-19 likely escaped from a laboratory.

Of course, fewer and fewer pandemic martinets remember indulging in that pantomimed perma-crisis.

Back in 2003, two-thirds supported with full throats and empty minds the Iraq war. Today, such people are thin on the ground. Nobody, it seems, ever supported the Iraq war.

Give it five years, few will remember grassing up their neighbours, policing strangers, and indulging in what might just turn out to be the folly to end all follies.

I often wonder how such people now fill their time in this relatively old normal. Now I know the answer: they’re milling around supermarkets, patting down strangers they suspect of harbouring over the permitted two cucumbers per person.

For now, they’ve found another crisis to indulge. As for turnips, no thank you. I’d sooner eat a bat from a Wuhan wet market.

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