As Wingham Wildlife Park has continued to grow, specialize and constantly strive to improve our husbandry we have had to make a decision to change where we get our fresh produce was. In the past, we had received around 95% of our fruit and vegetables from supermarkets sending us their waste. This was always sufficient and the quality was always surprisingly good. However in recent times supermarkets have started to focus more on splitting that waste into 2 categories, with the first being items which are suitable for human consumption, and those items heading to food banks and shelters, and then a second category for waste which is too far damaged for human consumption, and this is where we now fit in. We have found that we started to have to invest huge staff hours and waste costs into sorting this produce, much of which we were having to compost.

About a month ago it was time for our practices to change.

We decided that buying in fresh produce will likely give us a much better selection, variety depending on the time of year, huge savings on staff hours, reduced carbon footprint as we will be travelling just once per week and a guarantee that we’ll get exactly what we need at a high quality.

However to help give us even more variety we do still bring in the waste from our local co-op as they are very close and the waste from a single shop is still very manageable. During the summer months we also receive waste from the Thanet Earth local producer. We decided to keep these 2 sources to continue our work on helping to reuse local waste and compost what we do not use.

Our current system is ticking plenty of boxes for our internal strategies and seems to be working very well. We now have someone who visits the New Spitalfields produce market in London once per week and brings back around 7 to 10 days worth of fruits and vegetables (although it really is predominantly vegetables) in different produce categories… And this job is a little more complex than it sounds! Trying to estimate weights of things like cabbages, getting the right level of produce from the right categories and doing so at a reasonable price while also making sure not to buy more than we can fit in the van but also not coming home with half a van is quite the challenge!

I will put a table at the end of the document so that you can see how much produce of different types we get through in every single week (and this doesn’t even include things like supplements, insects, nuts, dry pellets and meat)… But first I want to go back to the title of this post and tell you the biggest challenge posed by this new process. When we go to the market (which is not generally used by the public, being a nighttime wholesale market – thankfully I’ve only gone 3 times and usually leave it to karl now as its a 4am start) we actually do need to play a game of “what’s that veg?” It can be so hard to know what an item is, because there are so many amazing exotic fruits, vegetables, and fungi there. Sometimes we don’t even know if an item is a fruit or a vegetable, or just a piece of wood the seller left on the side!

Let me show you some of these crazy fruits and veg!

(I will write about each set of pictures before the image and working from left to right)

First, we have something which I had been looking for each time I went there because I know that for orangutans their favourite fruit in the wild is often jackfruit. Knowing this, even though our orangs don’t get huge levels of fruit due to how sugary commercial fruit is, I thought that a jackfruit (or durian fruit, I’d also love to get them a durian), would be such a treat for Belayan, Molly and Jin. So I found this beauty on the left and it was huge! I asked for the price which was £8 or so per Kg with this monster weighing in at well over 11Kg… Needless to say, I just couldn’t justify almost £90 of our weekly produce budget on a single fruit which would just be used as a treat. So if anyone out there wants to help us get a huge treat for the orangutans and gibbons I think that’s the only way we would be able to afford it… I know you can get it cheaper in cans or vacuum packed but it’s just not the same as a fresh one.

I then thought that these little guys on the right were small jackfruit but it turns out that even better they have what I think is possibly the best fruit name on the planet (other than bananitos) as these fruits which supposedly have the texture of banana and flavours of strawberry and apple are called guanabanas (or soursop if you want to be boring).

Next, we have a fruit which has the texture of an apple and flavour of custard, so they’re creatively known as custard apples! I have a feeling (although not 100%) that the top fruits in the second image are also a different type of custard apple and below that looks like Chinese pear which is just like any pear but with a milder sweeter taste. The final one is called a prickly pear but is no pear at all, but is actually the fruit of a variety of cactus. It is described as a very bland melon flavour and is often used alongside vegetables and fried, but does have one of the highest concentrations of vitamin c for any fruit.

We’re getting in to really weird territory now! That purple thing is a banana flower which has a fairly bland flavour but due to the texture when cooked is sometimes used as a vegetarian fish alternative… Who knew! Next is what I believe to be Thai taro which is a root vegetable which can be added to things like soups and bread alternatives as well as being eaten like potato, but it has to be cooked or can irritate the throat, so is unlikely to ever be used by us at the park. I believe the next one might also be some kind of taro as it looks a lot like the taro I ate in Vietnam once, whilst the next similar-looking root looks like it might be a yam which is used in much the same way. As for that last image – absolutely no clue! I guess maybe a peeled or cooked and then packaged yam?

Apparently, Ruth has had this first veg but I don’t remember ever seeing one of these things in my life! It does have a fun name though as this giant radish-like root veg is called a mooli or daikon! The next green balls the size of golf balls are round Thai eggplants which are used in much the same as aubergine but just smaller. You get them in purple and yellow too, but I’ve not seen the yellow ones just yet and found the purple ones to be quite a bit bigger than the greens.

Apparently, this first one isn’t all that exotic or weird, as it seems to be everywhere at the market. It’s a romanesco which is apparently like a cross between cauliflower and broccoli but more tender than either of them. It certainly looks like some kind of futuristic space cauliflower! incidentally, we also see a lot of purple cauliflower while we’re there. Next, I’ll put this with the weird vegetable but it’s actually a fruit – it’s a bitter melon. They have a very bitter flavor and are almost exclusively eaten cooked to help improve the flavour. It is quite prized in Chinese and Indian cuisine to add bitter flavors in stir fry and curry dishes. I think that’s the weirdest-looking produce I have listed here! We finish off the weird veggies I can identify with the ridge gourd – a bland vegetable that is used in a similar way to cucumber and courgette in Indian dishes like chutneys and raita.

I’ll finish off with some bits I just can’t fully identify – so first is an absolute mystery! I guess that it might be some kind of mango or related fruit? But I really have no idea. This is then followed by what I guess might be some kind of melon? And finally, we have a bean of some sort – now it doesn’t look like anything special in the photo, but these things are huge!

Whilst writing about some of the other vegetables I came across what I think might be that middle picture above! It could well not be a melon at all! It’s called a dosakai, or Indian yellow cucumber…. That massive thing is a cucumber!

How much and which fruits and vegetables do we use each week?

As you can see from the tables below we get through at least 840 Kg of vegetables and 220 Kg of fruits each week, and we use so much more food on top of this too (we have a meat delivery of around this combined weight once per 3 to 4 weeks as well). Whilst this may well be a huge bill each week it’s an essential part of keeping the animals happy and healthy, and the decision to hand pick our own produce each week gives us full control of the process whilst freeing up the equivalent of almost 2 full-time staff members in working hours by changing our methods has been a brilliant decision so far.

If you want to see who eats all of this produce, head to our Animal A – Z and sort the list by diet… And of course even better still come over and see them for yourself to see the animals tucking in to this delicious produce.

Vegetables

Veg GroupLeafy GreensVine GrowersRoots
White cabbageBroccoliCarrot
SpinachSproutsGarlic
Red cabbageSweetcornPotato
Iceberg lettuceCucumberOnion
Spring greensAubergineSweet potato
ChicoryOkraSwede
Romaine lettuceTomatoCeleriac
ArtichokeGreen peppersRadish
Savoy cabbagePeasBeetroot
WatercressMarrowFennel
Pak choiMange toutNeeps
KalePumpkinYam
LeekCourgetteTurnip
Combined Weight260 Kg280 Kg300 Kg

Fruits

Fruit GroupPommesCitrusMusaBerriesExotics
AppleOrangeBananaStrawberryPassionfruit
PearMandarinCherryMango
TangerineBlackberryPapaya
RaspberryPineapple
BlueberryLychee
KiwiPomegranate
GrapesFigs
Melons
Combined weight80 Kg30 Kg70 Kg20 Kg20 Kg

As I mentioned earlier New Spitalfield’s market isn’t your average market where you can go and do your weekly home veg shop. It’s a market for the trade and is incredibly busy with people and machinery everywhere. We go there to buy over a tonne of produce each week and from the first time we went we couldn’t believe how much weird and wonderful produce is not only available at the market, but exists at all! I’d never heard of a bitter melon or guanabana before and hope that these images show you some of the amazing variety the world has to offer if we look close enough, how much of a challenge it is to get the right food for our animals, how much fresh fruit and veg we use in a week and finally of course to see if anyone wants to get our Belayan, Molly, Jin, Oli, Vera and Pickle and big fresh jackfruit to share 😉

About Markus - Curator

Markus is the animal collections curator at Wingham Wildlife Park and has been with the park since 2009. When working with the animals he still spends time in the reptile house which has always been his passion and forte. Outside work his main passion is travelling the world and seeing animals in their natural habitats.