Environment secretary urges Britons to ‘cherish’ turnips amid food shortages

theguardian.com:

The UK environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, has caused a furore after she suggested people should “cherish” seasonal foods such as turnips as bad weather cleared supermarket shelves of tomatoes and other fresh produce.

“It’s important to make sure that we cherish the specialisms that we have in this country,” Coffey told parliament. “A lot of people would be eating turnips right now rather than thinking necessarily about aspects of lettuce and tomatoes and similar.”

With a love of turnips more commonly associated with the long-suffering manservant Baldrick in Blackadder, Coffey handed her critics the kind of material they could normally only dream of.

“Let them eat turnips!” suggested the Labour MP Ben Bradshaw, using the hashtag #TomatoShortages, as “turnips” started to trend on Twitter timelines for possibly the first time.

Coffey made her comments after being called to the Commons to answer an urgent question about supermarket rationing of salad ingredients, owing to shortages caused by bad weather in Spain and north Africa. She had been trying to make a point about eating seasonally.

“I’m conscious that consumers want a year-round choice and that is what our supermarkets, food producers and growers around the world try to satisfy,” she added.

Was a bounty of this unloved root vegetable part of the promised Brexit dividend? people asked, as they shared doctored images of campaign buses emblazoned with “forget tomatoes, let’s eat turnips instead”.

@theNewEuropean asked whether Brexit might be a factor in the tomato shortage alongside an image of what looks like Spain’s annual La Tomatina tomato fight.