My dear! Spam!! Tinned peaches!!

A favourite theme in the Garudian today, and another contribution to the great mystery of what luvvies want to remain for exactly.

It's an old concern though -- the poor luvs won't have nice fresh fruit and veg all the year round at reasonable prices thanks to European labour being ripped off.

This piece leads with the worst possibilities: 

Hello spam and tinned peaches: is Britain facing a Brexit food crisis?

The British foodie revolution of the last few decades was made possible by the wealth of exotic produce from the EU. Is the country now sleepwalking into food insecurity – or are predictions of catastrophe as overhyped as the millennium bug?

Well, I think we should be told -- and we are, relying on things like the price of --yes -- strawberries:

Today, we eat two-and-a-half times more strawberries and raspberries than in 1996, mostly homegrown. Without EU labour, we would be forced to import from Dutch and Belgian strawberry-growers or Portuguese raspberry-farmers, sending the price of a punnet soaring by an estimated 50%, and making the elusive five-a-day target even more distant for many.

 And 

When bad Spanish weather caused a shortage of courgettes and lettuce last February, many saw it as a taste of the homegrown disruption to come.

Dear God no! Not courgettes and lettuce too! It will be fish as well as veg since 

most of the oily fish and shellfish caught in British waters are exported to the continent, while we would almost certainly continue to import white fish from non-EU countries such as Iceland and Norway....But snobbery about traditional working-class seaside staples plays a part, too, as does ignorance over how to treat the delicacies that are shipped off to the continent.

Some ambiguity if not downright confusion with fish then. The article is fairly well balanced overall, though, even noting that

A rediscovery of locally sourced produce could compensate for economic harm elsewhere, while at the same time reducing food miles and perhaps addressing the sometimes appalling labour standards that have marred the industry at home and abroad.

But -- the very culture is threatened,dears:

“In the long run, you might see the arrival of a different sort of food culture: served by automated picking and packing and much more mechanised manufacturing,” says Ian Wright of the Food and Drink Federation. “It’s difficult to believe all of that can be done and retain the food culture we currently have.”...“Churchillian romantics who see Brexit as an opportunity to relive imperial or wartime days go silent if the culinary era of tinned peaches and spam is mentioned,” says Tim Lang, a professor of food policy at City university. “It was Europeanisation which coincided with – and, arguably, facilitated – the flowering of modern UK culinary culture.”

Smug BBC git N Watts once slyly confided in E Davis on Newsnight his hope that mechanization will solve the problem AND punish all those stroppy Leavers in rural areas, but

Some hope that robots will provide a solution to Brexit-induced labour shortages on farms, but Newenham is sceptical. “We are still at least 10 years away from a reliable robotic harvesting system,” he says.

We might end up with this:

[Brexit] could make wages here go ridiculous, and everything has to be passed on.

Heaven forbid!!