It’s not easy to find a tomato in the U.K. right now. And if you do, you’d better savor it.
Supermarkets like Tesco and Aldi have placed strict limits on the number of tomatoes customers can buy, as well as other produce, like cucumbers and broccoli.
Three Packs Left
Economist Tim Harford, host of the podcast Cautionary Tales, serves tomatoes to his family a lot.
So when he heard the news about shortages, he rushed to the local Tesco.
“There’s this whole shelf that normally has crates and crates of different kinds of tomatoes,” he recalls. “And there were just three packs left.”
Limit per customer: one package.
The last few years, this has been a familiar story. The pandemic created supply chain crises and shortages all across the global economy.
Mostly those have been resolved, so what’s going on with tomatoes?
Wild weather, energy prices and…
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