This week it’s:
Tomato tales
We look at Britain’s love affair with the humble tom
IT’S fair to say we love our tomatoes. Some gardeners with greenhouses are already beginning to crop them, and if we get a warm summer like last year then it promises to be a bumper year for them. In Britain, we eat around 500,000 tonnes of tomatoes every year (shop-bought as well as home-grown). This equates to around 6oz (160g), or the equivalent of two classic-sized tomatoes per person per week. That’s more than 100 tomatoes per person per year. Of course, they come in a range of sizes and varieties, from small cherry to large beefsteak, so let’s take a sideways glance at the humble tom!
British tomato growers produce around 100,000 tonnes of tomatoes per year, with the rest of them imported, mainly from the Netherlands and Morocco.
