Mouldy fruit from Tesco
I’m cross. When I buy fruit from a supermarket I don’t expect it to always be perfect, (although come to think of it why not? the prices are high enough!). Anyway I digress. More and more often I’m finding that fruit I buy from Tesco goes mouldy before it ripens. It’s not a problem with my house, or fridge, or fruitbowl – this doesn’t happen when I buy fruit from other shops.
These blackberries were the final straw for me. I was reluctant to buy blackberries from the off, since they’re so readily available in hedgerows everywhere, but I wanted some fat juicy special ones to top a gorgeous meringuey pudding so I bit the bullet and bought some.
And they looked fine, but while they were still in-date and before they ripened they had started to go mouldy! I tried one of the non-mouldy ones and it was hard and bitter and totally unripe.
The first few times this kind of thing happened I shrugged it off, and then I stopped buying soft fruit from Tesco for a while, but I’m really fed up about it. Yes, I could phone customer services and get the money refunded (probably) but frankly it’s still going to cost me another trip to the shops and I don’t want to do that.
Throughout the summer, the strawberries at my local Tesco store were often mouldy even while they were on the shelves – I can’t even remember how many times I looked through all punnets on offer and failed to find a single one that I’d be happy to pay money for.
The same is true for ‘Ready to Eat’ avocados (hard as bullets) and their ‘Ripen at Home’ peaches (they don’t ripen they just stay hard and go mouldy – same as the blackberries).
I know that perhaps this is perhaps the price we pay for convenience. The fruit is picked WAY earlier than it should be and is refrigerated, still completely unripe, to ripen on the shelves away from any of the natural sunlight which would normally help fruit ripen.
Is it just me? Is it just my local Tesco? I have no idea, but I do know that I’m fed-up and that I’ve got no fruit to put on my Pavlova.
To quote the Eurovision Song Contest: Tesco, “nul points”
Nice Like Nigella 