I think this photograph captures the essence of the early-21st-century consumer’s dilemma.

A trend that I only noticed in its infant stage in Canada is in full, nasty, brutish adolescence here in Britain. Vegetables and fruit at the supermarket are packaged in plastic. You can choose not to buy pre-packaged vegetables of course, but when you go the supermarket, the non-packaged ones also happen to be the ho-hum, bland ones. Take tomatoes for instance. Supermarket tomatoes are usually awful. Completely devoid of flavour and they’re usually mushier than a Very Special Episode of Growing Pains. The worst offenders are those gargantuan nuclear-waste beefsteak tomatoes from California with barely a blush of red. They’re like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Long Goodbye — completely out of proportion to normal, and completely forgettable. (Okay, so maybe I’m reaching a bit for my metaphors today.)

Sometime in the not-so-distant past, the supermarkets figured out that people might like eating real tomatoes. Small, firm, tasty ones. Cherry tomatoes, and tomatoes ripened “on the vine”. And so they sell those now too, but they cost about five times as much, and they’re packaged in plastic so that they can put flowery marketing prose all over them and so you don’t realize how few tomatoes you’re actually buying until you get home and take them out of the deceptively-arranged package. Sainsbury’s sells about ten different types of tomatoes now. Evidently Tesco has had its wonderful tomatoes featured on a TV program. That’s how good they are. (“Say friend, remember how tomatoes used to taste?”)

I was saying the other day to someone how it’s so hard to find different varieties of apples. Turns out Tesco also sells some unusual varieties if you’re willing to pay a premium. But they’re packaged. Four apples on a little foam plate, covered in plastic wrap. Apples! These things are supposed to be kept in big wooden crates in a shed. Why do you think they have to charge so much for the apples? Because they have to pay someone to wrap them up, four at a time!

I’m thrilled that I can buy tasty tomatoes and unusual apples, even if they cost most of my salary. Good tomatoes make salads worth eating. But must I also pay with my soul as well as my money? Nottingham doesn’t even have recycling boxes, so all of the packaging just ends up in a landfill. I’m pretty sure the plastic doesn’t improve the taste.

And I don’t even own a TV.