I am becoming a dab hand at turnip soup now that Family Harford eschews supermarket mange-tout in favour of a weekly organic box. I have to confess that I miss the marvellous mange-tout, bursting with freshness and rushed to me straight from Nairobi in a battered old 747.

The mange-tout is, sadly, now beyond the pale. My tree-hugging friends condemn the purchase of anything that has travelled what they judge to be excessively long distances - in the jargon, anything with too many "food miles". The term echoes "air miles" and the distinct impression we get is that anything you buy outside a farmers' market has been flown first class at terrible cost to the planet.