One recent Saturday morning, I lay in bed late, as is my wont, reading the paper. On the front page was a story about struggling British households, which face the worst squeeze on living standards since the 1970s: the result, mostly, of stagnant wage growth and rising prices. People are reining in their spending, the economy is weakening, and there are likely harder times ahead. On page three, however, the mood was a bit different, the headline shouting the arrival of edible flowers in British supermarkets – yours for £3 a punnet. The salad buyer at Waitrose, Tom Moore, talked of the appeal of such blooms for the “Instagram generation”, while his rival at Sainsbury’s, Vanessa Rider, described the way its new stocks of marigold, viola and monkey flower would enable customers to add, in the manner of lipstick to a tired face, “instant summer glamour” to their bowls of green stuff.
Crikey. Back in the 80s, you would occasionally find articles about the miner’s strike and nouvelle cuisine in the same magazine – a combination that could be somewhat queasy-making, especially if you happened to be reading said magazine, as I was, in the city where the National Union of Miners had its HQ. But then again, nouvelle cuisine was always more chimera than reality, being mostly just a means by which a tiny, elite group in a small collection of major cities could display their desire to be as thin as they were rich; you read about their tiny plates, spattered with a reduction of tomato and containing but a single scallop, and laughed out loud. These nasturtiums and dianthus, though, are not only in supermarkets; suppliers are said to be struggling to meet demand for them. Even if we blame The Great British Bake Off for this craze – the last series included a “botanicals week” – this development still seems weirdly decadent in the circumstances.
I don’t have a problem with food and flowers, per se. I love almond and orange flower tarts, rose and violet creams, elderflowers dipped in a little light batter and fried. What could be dreamier than the sherbet vendors Claudia Roden describes in A Book of Middle Eastern Food, the flasks on their shoulders glowing with the vibrant colour of the floral drinks within? (When Roden was growing up in Cairo, the violet-flavoured sherbet was pale green, and the rose-flavoured was a pale, sugary pink.) But these supermarket flowers are not ingredients; their taste and fragrance, in as much as they have such things at all, is beside the point. Though intended to be eaten, they’re more or less solely decorative. Basically, they’re garnishes. Three quid for a box of garnishes that will doubtless wilt in as long as it takes you to get them home.
It can’t only be because I was brought up on Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies (I know, embarrassing – though in my defence, I inherited the books from my mother) that I feel buying a load of petals like this is wrong. If you’re that way inclined – by which I mean, if you’re the sort of person who is always messing about with the filters on your phone the better to make your followers envy your supposedly idyllic lifestyle – then isn’t the thing to waft into your garden or on to your balcony and gather a few choice buds yourself? I think that it is. Flowers seem to me not to belong in little plastic pots, detached from their stems and leaves, remote from any hint of green – unless, of course, the flowers in question are broccoli, cauliflowers or globe artichokes.
But then, this idea is, I suppose, all of a piece with the bagged, chlorine-doused mixed leaves to which so many of us have become so addicted, and the two now look set to march hand in hand through the summer, for what’s an airy pile of delicate yellow and mauve flowers without some equally exotic leaves to match? Boring old romaine is not going to cut it here. Ah, well. There’s nothing to be done. Either this trend will fizzle – I can’t believe Paul Hollywood is going to hold sway for much longer, though admittedly I said that about Jeremy Corbyn, too – or summer flowers will become a slightly sad chiller cabinet staple. It’s a shame because there is nothing so uplifting as the sight of a single, freshly picked nasturtium burning atop a freshly made cake like a flame, and who would want to forget that, or to diminish it by endless, easy repetition? But it’s also the way of the world. Everything can be sold to us now, even something any child can grow from seed, practically overnight.
