Why do we expect to buy tomatoes and cucumbers all year round?

When did it become an inalienable human right for 65 million Britons to have a cucumber in March? When did we suddenly regard the possession, weekly, of a half kilo or so of vine-ripened tomatoes as fundamental to our very being, when our corner of the northern hemisphere is still essentially frozen and has been for months?

If we were in southern Italy or if London were transposed with Madrid – so 800 miles closer to the equator – then one might begin to think that a leafy salad or a few tomatoes could or should be a daily staple, even in these darker days. But up here, at 52 degrees north, in an archipelago off the last landmass before you have the void of the swirling Atlantic? Up here, in an archipelago that was so inhospitable that even the Romans (no slouches in their dedication to taking over the known world) decided it wasn’t worth it and simply put up a wall – a wall, furthermore, which they staffed with foreign auxiliaries while they headed off home to the enjoy the sunshine of Latium along with its olives, abundant mid-winter loose-leaf salads and flowing Frascati?

The current supermarket shortages of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other vegetables, which Defra is blaming on ‘poor weather in Spain and North Africa where they are produced’, have caused unhappiness in the aisles, with shoppers apparently fighting