Nine tomatoes for fifteen pounds? How the very basics became more expensive than oysters | Zoe Williams

Welcome to the hungry gap' - the time of year when salad days are months away, and there simply isn't enough food. To confront this in 2023 forces a reckoning

I don't even like tomatoes, especially, but I seemed to have nine in a paper bag, and had picked them up with my own hands - this detail will be important later. I had a couple of other things - a single onion and some herb that I could have just as easily stolen from a front garden - and my plan was to make salsa for assorted teenage fusspots, as well as tomato soup. Fifteen quid? I thought the decimal point was in the wrong place. Then I thought it must be a language barrier, and 15" was Portuguese for 4.50. I didn't really want to interrogate the shopkeeper, who I know by name, though she doesn't know my name, so there's a world in which I could have just dropped the lot and run. Obviously, I couldn't just get fewer tomatoes, because I had handled them all. But now I was embarked on work that I could have outsourced to Doritos and Heinz at one seventh of the cost and a 70th of the time, and it felt mad, obscurely vain, like Marie Antoinette milking a goat on her fake farm, a spoilt pantomime of the simple life.

I realise I'm not the only person to have noticed this, though I may be the first person to notice it only after I was locked in to a massive nine-tomato deal. Therese Coffey had already suggested we replace tomatoes with turnips, cue government cheerleaders suddenly full of enthusiasm for what we now call winter salad" and previously called coleslaw". Restaurants have been experimenting with so-called white replacements on tomato-thirsty food, such as pizza and pasta, but the white is not turnip, it tends to be cheese. There is no known culinary circumstance in which tomatoes and turnips are interchangeable, no situation at all.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist