Potatoes and lettuce will have to be replaced in the UK by small, mustardy root vegetables and dandelion leaves as a warming climate means we cannot rely on traditional crops, Kew Gardens has said.
We get most of our lettuce from Spain already. Climate change means w’ll get it from a bit of Spain 50 miles north of where we currently do.
And?
They even grow spuds in Egypt, what sort of arsehattery is this ?
Wasn’t it ‘experts’ like these who encouraged us all to plant Mediterranean garden plants for the future?
Rice would have been a better bet last year!
Do we really rely on traditional crops. In the last century we have moved to getting a wider variety of foods, and more ways of storing them.
Depends what Kew mean by traditional of course.
There are occasional surveys listing Britain’s favourite family meals – the top two, Spag Bol and Pizza, barely penetrated the lists of 60 years ago. Sunday Roast, fish and chips are ever present but even spuds come in many more varieties and grow across a range of temperatures.
I’m looking forward to all the dandelions migrating the north out of my garden
Climate change also means you will have to eliminate your meat consumption by Agenda2030, for by our calculations it does megadeth to the climate. Your beautiful sheep pastures grow dandelions aplenty, and in future they will be lovingly hand-harvested, and organically fertilised with human manure, by your country’s allocation of the billions of climate refugees. The aboriginal inhabitants will all be working hard on the development and production of version 3.2 of the Covid-31 vaccine.
Because cooking also causes climate change they will mostly be fermented, like sauerkraut, for you to enjoy cold. For occasional festive days fresh dandelion may be cooked, and served with a celebratory mealworm burger.
As dandelion leaves are notoriously diuretic(*), I think they’re taking the piss.
(*) English folk name “piss the bed”, French “pis en lit”
Well hardly, Tim. 50 miles north of the Costa del Plastico & you’re in the Desierto de Tabernas which tends to be what it says on the tin.
But you would think the people at Kew would have the whit to look up lettuce on Wiki. It’s a Mediterranean crop FFS. First cultivated in Egypt.
A lot of the spuds that they sell in my local Asda on the outskirts of Hull come from Scotland. It is a bit colder there but also nice and wet presumably. We had a handful of little ones that didn’t get eaten and went all shrivelled and started to sprout. I stuck them in the ground and they seem to be growing.
It is worth visiting Paul Homewood’s Not a lot of people know that website for regular debunking of climate change stories. One thing that he regularly uses are official graphs of long term temperature or rainfall records. These generally show some ups and downs but no long term trends.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/
Our most recent new potatoes came from Angus, a not-wet part of Scotland.
I’m used to the idea that a lot of seed potatoes come from Ayrshire. Do they still?
All the seed potatoes in my local garden centre in Dorset appear to come from Scotland.
Great spuds here – and it was 33 today…
@ BlokeinCyprus
Yes, I agree. Before joining the EEC we used to buy potatoes from Cyprus – then part of the Commonwealth – as an alternative to Jersey Royals (either cheaper or the season was different, or both). So if it gets *a lot* warmer we could import the seeds and grow them here, but the UK’s unlikely ever to get that warm.
Potatoes, eh? You mean the highly adaptable weed with over 1000 cultivars that literally grows anywhere you care to put it in the soil as long as there’s some water and sunlight? That potato?
In fact.. grows so well that it has replaced quite a number of Actually Traditional Root Crops all over the world since its introduction to the point those old crops only really being known in culinary circles and by historians.
…..right…
And lettuce ( which veriety exactly?) nowadays commercially gets grown in greenhouses.. Because it’s a jittery crop..
Last time I checked greenhouses have the capacity to emulate “climate” to the tune of factor near-infinity compared to even the worst nightmare ( or wet dream..) of the climate fetishists.
See me worry.. oh dearie me… Gosh!, even…
And wasn’t lettuce introduced to England by Catherine of Aragon? Spanish lettuce is still much better than limp English leaves despite global warming
And wasn’t lettuce introduced to England by Catherine of Aragon?
Surprised she didn’t take it back it her after all that Anne Boleyn business.
Dear Mr Worstall
Back in the day the source for lettuce and potatoes in Enugu, Nigeria was Jos. Both veggies were small and the lettuce bitter.
Still the potato capital of Nigeria it seems.
Weatherwise: warm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos#Geography_and_climate
It would be nice if the UK was reliably as warm, even if only for the summer.
DP
Matt Damon even managed to grow spuds on Mars.
Potatoes are one of Greenlands biggest commercial exports or so I’ve heard.
They are also a commercial export from Egypt.
Sort of implies there is a huge climatic range they can thrive in.
Had to go and look that up and it doesn’t seem to be true. Local growing in Greenland supplies about 10% of domestic demand for potatoes.
The wider claim, that they grow from Egypt to Greenland is true which is also interesting……
“The wider claim, that they grow from Egypt to Greenland is true which is also interesting……”
It also soundly refutes the absurd claims being made in the OP. The claims of the climate change alarmists seem to get ever more ridiculous the longer the real world continues to ignore their prognostications.
More evidence that most activism is LARPing to get noticed, and to get noticed you have to say sillier and sillier things.