How to avoid a no-meal Brexit

The Daily Mail has been terrifying people with its Brexitic no-dealery, declaring that on January 1^st we’ll not be able to eat any foreign muck and will have to make do with toast and chips. As ever, the Mail is quite wrong. I’ve been looking carefully at some of the staple overseas foodstuffs of modern Britain and it’s clear we can easily replace them with traditional home-grown products that are just as delicious.

Delicious

 

Let’s start with tomatoes. It’s true that, for at least half the year, you can’t really grow them in the UK, but that’s fine. Once our no-deal Brexit is secured by Prime Minister Wohnston Burchill, we can swiftly switch to beetroot, especially now it isn’t needed to sell to eastern European soup fans. Within days we’ll all be tucking into delicious Spaghetti Bostonnaise with relish*!

Bolognese

(*Untomatoed.)

 

OK, yes, there’s a chance that supplies of elongate durum wheat-based carbohydrates will also dry up, but once again, the fields of eastern England will come to our rescue. Vermiform, protein-rich, and incredibly easy to gather, earthworms make for a much more nutritious alternative to boring old spaghetti. And if Lumbricus terrestris is too chunky for your diners’ palate, just pop down to your nearest low-salinity mudflats and dig up Capitella capitata instead. Hey pesto**! Vermicelli Bostonnaise!

Sweetcorn

(**not available)

 

Worrying about Brexit food shortages is bananas. They might not grow in the EU, or on trees, but don’t fret about your favourite fruit. If the port blockages and lorry pile-ups leave you going bonkers for these bizarre berries, switch to eating slugs instead. Not only is Britain’s ear-shelled slug banana-coloured, but its favourite food is earthworms, so by consuming them you’ll be patriotically keeping our vermicelli supplies up too. Slug it to the Eurocrats and make molluscs your main meal!

Bananas

As we approach Christmas, many people like to buy some Brazil nuts. After Brexit, these dental-damaging delicacies could be scarce, but here in the UK we always have a tasty alternative. Chesil nuts are found in huge quantities along the Jurassic Coast, and unlike Brazil nuts, which are only rich in selenium, Chesil nuts are rich in all manner of minerals. AND the sea has kindly sorted them into whatever size you prefer, so it’s simple to go and bag up your favourite variety. Remoaners say Brexit is nuts. How wrong they are.

Chesil nuts

 

Pizza, meanwhile, was supposed to be helping the Brexit negotiations but it didn’t, and soon its toppings and its dough will be gone from the streets of Britain. Luckily, the streets of Britain are also covered in pizza’s symbiotic replacement: lichen. Thin crust or deep pan, lichen are stable, mutually supportive associations, where the exports of one are the imports of the other, with no tariffs applied. Such invasive utopian nonsense means they deserve to be eaten, so get your weapons out and start scraping. Soon everyone in Bounceback Brexit Britain will be lichen some daring new dinner options!

Lecanora muralis between meals can help reduce truth decay.

After dinner, a cup of coffee is always welcome. The UK is now one of the British Isles’ leading consumers of freshly ground coffee. In 2020, each person drank 95 million cups a day. Any interruption to our caffeine dependence could spell trouble, so thank goodness Britain has a tasty, readily available alternative, which doesn’t spell trouble, No, it spells S-O-I-L. Being a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and organisms, soil is much like the Cabinet and nearly as rich. Get your mug and dig in!

Despite its unusual name, Washmglon’s was one of the first successfully mass-produced coffees

 

For those Brexiteers who are really refined consumers, you can take this a step further. Hummus is all well and good if you like Middle Eastern chickpea dishes, but once we’ve no-dealt our way out of Europe, it’s best to forget all about it. Instead, grab your coffee, select only the organic fraction, and impress your friends at dinner parties with a side helping of humus. If you’re lucky, it might be mushroom-flavoured, or insect-rich, making it perfect for dipping lichen crusts in. 

Ambassador, with these Brexitic bounties you are really soiling*** us!

Sunlit uplands

 

(***When you scrape away at the incomprehensible foreign words and render them into the Queen's English, Ferrero Rocher means ‘iron and boulders'. Iron and boulders are just two more of the delicious treats that will be available to the enriched folks of Bountiful Brexit Britain.)

Now, where’s my gammon…?