A Greedy Man in a Hungry World by Jay Rayner

Author:Jay Rayner
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

I watch Jazz apples trundling down conveyors on the way to being bagged for one of the supermarkets. Mansfield’s supplies all of the major retailers here. Do the buyers demand the chucking out of lots of fruit because it isn’t perfect?

‘Very little these days. It’s rarely more than 5 per cent and the vast majority of that can go to the juice industry,’ Chris says. ‘The supermarkets have recognized that there is an appetite among consumers for budget packs of apples that aren’t all perfect.’ He takes me for a tour of the huge orchards, where they grow Bramley, Jazz and Braeburn. We stop off at Buddy’s grave and then head off to meet Paul. Along the way we take a wrong turning off the motorway and end up covering the same ten-mile stretch of road three times instead of just once.

My mission to meet the biggest apple supplier in Britain is beginning to feel doomed.

When I do finally get to meet the Mr Big of British apples it is not in a James Bond baddie’s lair. He is not stooped over a map of the world, shifting model apples about from one bit of territory to the next, as he plans juicy world domination. He does not have a white cat. He’s in the depths of a gloomy village pub not far from Sittingbourne and he has a plate of roast pork belly. He’s with a couple of other fruit farmers, Robert Hinge and Lance Morrish, who are members with Mansfield of a growers’ group called Fruition. They are also involved in a marketing organization called World Wide Fruit, which, with their sister organization in New Zealand, Enza, has the sole licence to grow Jazz apples in the UK. It is clear, however, that Mansfield’s is the senior partner here. Paul is the biggest grower by a very long way.

He’s also imposing: stocky, with a barrel chest and skin the colour of a conker from the Portuguese holiday just gone. He has big, solid hands, with fingers like bunches of baby bananas, and on one little finger he wears a signet ring heavy with diamonds, the one outward sign of his success. But he’s disarmingly self-effacing. He tells the story of how his old dad got started in the fruit-growing business; that he was just a greengrocer from a line of them, that his grandmother Emma used to sell fruit and veg from what would have been the front room of a two-up-two-down in the East End back in the twenties.

‘My dad slept upstairs in a bed with his five brothers. Six to a bed. Emma, my grandmother, she went off to Covent Garden every day, though these were the days when it was horse and cart.’

Buddy eventually struck out alone, and went from running a single shop to one of the biggest in the area, alongside stalls in local markets. He needed so much fruit that he started going direct to the growers down in Kent.

‘Then he needed somewhere to store all his boxes, and this farm was available, so he bought it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.