Good intentions don’t always deliver the results you’re hoping for. But both of my children have grown up strong and healthy. They’ve turned into young adults thankfully untroubled by major health problems.

I’ll put this down in part to eating fresh, home cooked food as far as possible, and being taught to understand the importance of vitamins and minerals for healthy skin, teeth and hair. Appealing to their vanity has often been the key, I’ve found.

Hardened as they are to the weird bits on carrots and potatoes that look slightly past their sell-by date, they’re going to have no trouble with the ‘wonky’ fruit and vegetables that Lidl and Waitrose have committed to selling from now on.

It’s heartening to hear that these major supermarkets have made it a stated policy that they will not reject produce that doesn’t fit an airbrushed aesthetic ideal. These retailers are doing this to support British farmers whose fields and crops have been blighted by drought conditions and the driest summer for 50 years.

“Farmers across the country are facing a big challenge this year due to the extreme weather conditions experienced over the summer months,” says Lidl GB’s chief executive, Ryan McDonnell.

“Whilst the crop coming out may look and feel a bit different to what we’re all used to, it’s still the same great British quality. We therefore want to show support for our suppliers by working with them to find solutions to help.”

Hats off to the man. And to his counterpart at middle-class favourite Waitrose, which has brought out the politely-named ‘A Little Less Than Perfect’ range, relaxing size and shape guidelines for new season potatoes, carrots, strawberries, apples, pears and peppers. Food, after all, is for eating, not displaying in tastefully-chosen artisan bowls on scrubbed kitchen tables.

I hope that other supermarkets follow their lead. It is extremely important to support our rural economy, especially given the fact that food security already represents a potentially deadly threat to even relatively affluent western countries.

We don’t have to go too far back in history, and certainly within living memory, to the Second World War, when the UK was forced to live on rations.

And, let’s not forget, rationing lasted for years after hostilities had ceased; some children of my parents’ generation, born in the 1940s, didn’t see fresh fruit such as oranges and bananas until they were teenagers in the 1950s.

It could happen again, quite easily. And now, not only do we have war and strife ripping countries apart (still) we have the threat of climate change and drought, made very real by the extreme weather conditions we’ve experienced this summer. And the cost of living is rocketing up thanks to soaring inflation.

I don’t know about you, but I can hardly bear to look at the prices of items in the supermarket any more; they seem to be doubling by the week.

When I’m in my local Asda, I just hold my nerve and fill my basket with the ‘Just Essentials’ range. And I bear that bright yellow ‘bargain’ packaging like a badge of honour.

I understand that some people have criticised the Leeds-based supermarket for this eye-catching colour scheme, saying that it makes hard-up shoppers stand out like poverty-stricken victims.

My answer to that is defiant; we’re all in this together, poor or rich, and it’s about time we accepted that unless we’re millionaires, we’re all going to have to tighten our belts.

I’ve never had much truck with people who would (literally) go to the ends of the earth to only buy their food from a certain fancy store, and who delighted in making this sad little pastime known to less-enlightened friends.

At the end of the day, mashed potato is mashed potato, whether it started life as a plain old common or garden spud or a delicate Bonnotte, generally held to be the world’s most expensive variety, grown mainly in the Vendee region of France.

If you’ve ever been in a position where you’ve had to mentally add up the cost of items before you put them in your basket, you’ll understand where I’m coming from. Perhaps having periods in my life where I’ve been seriously hard-up has prepared me for these straitened times.

However, there are so many people living in food poverty now in the UK - five million, in 2020, according to the Government’s latest Family Resources Survey, and this figure is definitely a conservative estimate post-pandemic.

In the scheme of things then, I don’t think that eating a wonky carrot or ugly swede is going to harm anyone, do you? In fact, it might just save their life.

We all need to stop being fussy about vegetables to help local farmers - Jayne Dowle