I must be honest. I can’t say that I’m suffering too much, in this, the Great Iceberg Lettuce Shortage. Even before I discovered that at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, they serve a dish called Mr Trump’s Wedge Salad (of which iceberg lettuce is, we hope and pray, the primary ingredient), I wasn’t too keen on the stuff. But in any case, in these parts there’s no sign at all of a crisis. My local corner shop currently has three outside it, albeit a touch yellow at the edges, and the amazing greengrocer up the road – the one that was once in Vogue – still has trays of the things, not to mention all the other veg (aubergines, broccoli, courgettes) of which the bad weather in Spain is supposed to be depriving us. What does this mean? Is the Great Iceberg Lettuce Shortage an example of fake news? Or is it just that I live in a place where people would rather eat rocket?

Let’s assume, though, that somewhere desperate lettuce hounds are indeed waving 50-quid notes at supermarket staff. Aren’t such shortages in reality a good thing? As experts (I know, I know) such as Professor Tim Lang of City University have already taken the trouble to point out, Brexit is likely to have a momentous effect on the food we buy. Food stocks in Britain are low: an estimated three to five days’ worth; our self-sufficiency stands at only 61%; we get 30% of our food from the EU. Meanwhile, a lot of what we do produce here is picked and packaged by foreign workers. In the long term, we need to start worrying about the way food production affects climate change and vice versa. In the short term, prices are likely to rise dramatically. Basically, we need to start thinking about food security pronto, and if it’s the want of a bowl of winter ratatouille that focuses minds, then so be it.

Brexiteers of a nostalgic bent (quite possibly most of them) might, at this point, usefully ponder the war, and the measures that led to a period of rationing that would last 14 years. These, remember, were born of panic and desperate need, not national saintliness. If people were stoical, they were frequently ravenously hungry, too. How fantastic it would be if we could only fix it for Andrea “let-young-British-people-pick-our-cherries” Leadsom, the secretary of state for agriculture, to spend six months living on such delights as hasty pudding (ingredients: six tablespoons of oatmeal, three of suet, a pint of cold water, and one onion or parsnip) and the occasional tin of pilchards. Imagine the good it would do her. She might even stop going on about all the naan bread we are going to export to India in this bright new future of ours.

Until now, we’ve had a false sense of security, all kinds of foods having seemingly been readily available to us at all times of the year, and at artificially low prices to boot. Of course it’s a little bit great that fresh lemongrass is so common now as to be boring. But variety has spoiled us, too. We crave certain dazzling flavours, and consider instant gratification – tonight: green beans from Kenya! – almost to be a right. Think, though, of leeks in wintertime, cooked in butter until they are soft and sweet and yielding. How much lovelier they are than a salad sprayed with pomegranate seeds and olive oil, however much your vitamin D-deprived soul longs for such a thing. That salad will taste better – just right – come the early summer. This isn’t only a matter of seasonality. A pleasure deferred is a pleasure extended, as anyone who is addicted to English asparagus will tell you (only nine weeks to go).

What we need now, perhaps, is for our new circumstances and a certain kind of modishness somehow to collide, for people to start thinking of, say, swede and turnips – grown here so easily in season – in the same way that they thought of the horrible tasteless pumpkins and dishes with too much sumac in them that edged them off our menus in the first place. Personally, I don’t think this unlikely. I keep thinking of kale, ubiquitous now in our supermarkets and restaurants. In the 80s, when my dad sowed what we always called curly kale on his allotment, he did so because you saw it in the shops only rarely then. No one wanted it – or at least, they wanted it a great deal less than they did spring greens and celery. Though it grew like wildfire, huge dark green trees that we sometimes struggled to carry home as children, it was – honestly, kids – to us a distinctly exotic vegetable. We spoke of it rather snobbishly, and ate it with pride and Yorkshire puddings.