As I Hear .. . Potatoes And Onions

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31362, 6 May 1967, Page 17

As I Hear .. . Potatoes And Onions

(By

J.H.E.S.

It is a long time since 1 grumbled about potatoes, and time to grumble again. I have several grumbles. New potatoes came in early, as they should, and were not unreasonably dear, which is as it should be, too. They were easy to scrub or to skin with a small knife; and that again was as it should be. They were often heavily caked with soil. Lumps as big as a walnut are, perhaps, a bit thick, especially when they project from a coating, all over, from an eighth to a quarter of an inch deep. But it was a wet spring about Pukekohe, where the soil, though light, is sticky; and I complained not at all. It was my very good greengrocer who complained, because he had to buy and sell a considerable weight of dirt So far, though, so good. But it was not long before this early spring idyll was destroyed by rough reality. These really new new potatoes were displaced by what I can only call sham new potatoes. The skins would not rub off or scrape off easily. A soak in warm water eased the difficulty but only eased It. One might say that these sham new potatoes were casehardened: by being left on the ground too long, after lifting; by being left too long in hot trucks or hot sheds, or however it may be. Their skins were toughened on them and sometimes had begun to green. It was not long, in fact, before so-called new potatoes took on the look and quality of old potatoes. I protest that this is not desirable or necessary. When I farmed in Opawa, I had new potatoes, really new potatoes, from the first week in November through till May. Is it not possible for growers to supply the market with new potatoes, properly so-called, through a season of something like the same length? If it is possible, and I am sure it is, why don’t they? Is it because the housewife, ignorant or penny-wise, will hot pay the slight difference between the price of new potatoes properly so-called and new potatoes improperly so-called? And I fear, I greatly fear, that this is a not insignificant factor. But will no growers test them and test the market? But that is not the end of it. As the season has gone on, I have found myself buying (new potatoes already beginning to sprout for their next growth. Where had they been lying or stored? I have found myself buying (new) potatoes heavily bruised, split, or sliced. Where and why had they been trampled on, crushed, or dug at with a slicing spade instead of a flat-bladed fork? Do our machine potatodiggers have blades instead

of tines? I remember one day, walking down the Avon, Dallington way, and seeing a Chinese gardener lift his potatoes—“lift” is the word, not “dig”—with a wide fork of four or five broad tines. He moved along his row with a lovely rhythm and precision, laying his crop behind him to his left: a beautiful example of husbandry. Do we have to come so far beyond the Chinese peasant and do so much worse?

I grumble in this way because I remember, a year or so ago, a resolution of the Potato Growers’ Federation (or some such body), recognising that the condition in which potatoes reached the wholesale and retail markets was ba<j and proposing to investigate the possibility of crating instead of bagging potatoes for long-haul transport to market. Well, then, what came of this well-inten-tioned resolution and investigation? I can report only that I have seen no result whatever.

So I pass to onions, a new topic. It will not be denied that this is a season during which one should be able to count on buying sound, matured, new season's onions. I cannot count on it. I buy onions in 31b lots, generally. I have for some weeks bought few such lots without finding several unsound ones. But most conspicuous was my purchase of 31b from a Wellington departmental store. True, I do not generally buy my onions from this source; more usually, from the greengrocer referred to above, and he protects me, as a good shopman will. But this lot . . . it consisted of large and medium onions. I picked out one large and one medium for my dish. The large one was completely rotten; the medium, mostly. As I looked into it, I found that the large ones showed the hard neck of a run-up to flower and seed, cut off an inch or so above the bulb, which of course in the way of nature had begun to rot. The medium ones had not run so far but few were sound. My guess is that the grower had, last season, found some of his onions short of maturing and had left them in the ground, with the result that, upon the impulse of the new spring, they had rushed up to seed, and to decay. I do not go beyond stating the facts; but one of the facts is this, that any onion-grower who sees his onions running up to the neck of flower and seed stalk knows that his onions are not sound and that he ought not to sell them as sound. Caveat emptor, of course. As an emptor, I generally see what I buy and

am advised by my good friend the greengrocer as well. Even so, I am sometimes deceived. But what of the casual customer, of this or that trader? Is she not entitled to assume that what she buys is of sound quality? Onions? Potatoes? I write

these words because I wonder if the other party to the bargain, the grower, earns her trust, always. Or that other party, the distributor. It bothers me that the shopper, today, foolish and ignorant as she may be, is so often sold a pup.