Kate Hawkesby: Fruit and veges aren't exactly garden to table

I am on what seems a never-ending quest to find a good fruit and vege supplier - and it’s not the supermarket. I’m so sick of soft old apples and wilted lettuce on supermarket shelves, I’m hankering for a good farmers market vibe to get fresh produce into the house. I’ve tried many of the online ones, the companies who purport to pick it fresh that morning and deliver straight to your door. But so far not great, they’re average, but not as fresh as you might hope. Bit hit and miss. You may get a dodgy bunch of bananas and a questionable cucumber, the salad greens are OK - but it’s consistency I’m looking for. My husband and I often talk about growing our own, the problem though with country living is that unless you have a greenhouse or a raised covered vege bed, you’re going to get attacked by pests. My parents raised their vege gardens on Waiheke, then put extra fencing around them, the rabbits still found a way in. A whole family of them. Any rural vege patch is usually taken over by small furry (unwanted) friends. I’ve tried pots, I’ve tried raised troughs, but I only manage to keep things alive and growing for a short time though. And that’s before we get to the elements - a big gust of wind and some torrential rain makes sure anything you thought you might have hope in growing is decimated before you can say ‘green thumb’. I think the costs of veges these days, and the increasingly dodgy quality of them only exacerbates consumer annoyance with this particular food group. Also having been in Australia, seeing so much bountiful fresh produce available – and so much cheaper – really makes you feel ripped off here in NZ. The things we do manage to grow at home – easy things like grapefruit, lemons, feijoas, figs, oranges and mandarins.. they’re all fantastic – but they require very little of us. They grow in spite of us. Any vege or fruit that needs a lot of nurturing tends to become a fulltime job, like the avocado trees which are yet to produce any fruit despite my determination to persist with them. So I have huge admiration for the growers who are doing it and doing it well – but something happens between them harvesting it, and it reaching us. It’s not exactly garden to table. It’s garden to store house to conveyor belt to bag to truck to more storage facilities, to supermarket fridges to supermarket shelves. Which is why it’s not surprising that half the stuff you see on supermarket shelves has virtually wilted before you’ve even driven it home and unpacked it. Any time I raise this people tell me to ‘buy in season’ and ‘grow your own’ and we do try where we can. I mean the $20 a punnet blueberries I saw the other day are a joke and I'm not sure who's buying those, but you can at least get decent strawberries at the moment for a quarter of that price. But I just wonder why it’s so hard to consistently get good produce – even when it is in season. When fruit and veges were cheaper, you could understand why people would be less fussy about it, but the way fruit and vege is priced these days, means if you have to chuck out a whole lettuce or bunch of silverbeet because it's lifespan was half an hour, then that’s cost you dearly. And that’s before you even get to whether it’s organic or not. A bunch of organic silver beet the other day was $10 at my local supermarket. Ten dollars, for about eight leaves of silver beet. You can see why people say it’s hard – and expensive – to eat healthy. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.