That’s Odd...

 Quite a few years ago we had a brilliant local veg box scheme - a small company run by a nice chap who really cared about the produce he sourced. Sadly his attention to detail and fresh, high quality produce actually made him too successful in some ways - he built up a sizeable customer base at which point he got an offer he couldn’t refuse from another established box scheme company, and sold to them. Rapidly from our perspective prices went up, and quality down, and we stopped ordering boxes soon after.  

We’ve said for a long while that we’re not in the least fussed about our veg being organic - we don’t buy that normally, and so there’s no reason for us to pay for a box of organic veg either, but pretty much all the schemes running currently trade in the basis of being organic. The exception to that is London based Oddbox - and I’ve been keeping a regular eye on them for the last little while in the hope that they would start covering our area, two weeks ago I popped our postcode into the box on the website and voila! “We delivery to your area on a Saturday” - hurrah! 

Oddbox work on the premise of “rescuing” fruit and veg which would otherwise go to landfill - items that don’t look right for the mainstream stores - or are the wrong size, or are just surplus to requirements. They buy it up, then sell it on to people like us who don’t care that the peppers have a few blemishes, or that I’m getting potatoes because there were more of them than the supermarkets wanted this week. 

You get your box of veg - ours was the medium Veg only box - they also do a fruit and veg combined and a fruit only box. It comes with a leaflet with some recipe ideas for some of the items in the box, and a list (above) confirming why all the items you’ve been sent are there. From my perspective the delivery time (Oddbox deliver overnight to save on emissions) plus the fact that you can see what is expected to be in your box ahead of time means that I can always be sure of fresh veg for Sunday lunch. Just getting the box means we’ll increase the amount of veg in our diet - and we were no slouches on that front in the first place.  Although this week’s offerings were fairly “usual” for us, I’m also hoping that we get some different stuff here and there to shake our meals up a bit. As for this week, there will be a stew,  a stir fry, and some salad with an omelette, as well as some spinach thrown into tonight’s risotto, and I’m looking forward to planning to use up every last scrap! 

Robyn