Peas deserve a comeback: 37 grams a week is not enough for Britain's most useful vegetable
UK pea consumption has fallen to a 50-year low — an average of 37g per person per week in 2025, down from 144g in 1975, according to Defra figures reported this weekend. Frozen peas are cheap, available and versatile enough for soup, dips, pasta, risotto and curries, and most of us already have a bag waiting in the freezer.
The pea is having a quiet crisis. Figures from Defra, reported this weekend, put average UK consumption at just 37 grams per person per week in 2025, down from 144 grams in 1975 — a 50-year low for a vegetable that was once a British staple. The reporting also notes how completely frozen peas dominate what Britain eats, with most consumed peas grown domestically and a large annual tonnage produced for freezing.
That is a pity, because the freezer bag solves the usual excuses. Frozen peas are picked and chilled quickly, keep for months, cost little, need no preparation and cook in minutes. Unlike the fresh vegetables wilting at the back of the fridge, they can wait indefinitely for the night you actually need them — which is precisely why they are so easy to forget.
The easiest way back in is soup. A simple pea soup needs little more than peas, stock, onion and a blender; frozen and fresh peas are hard to tell apart once blended, and a handful of mint or a squeeze of lemon lifts the whole bowl. A pea and mint dip, mashed with feta or a soft cheese and served on toast or with bread and crudités, takes the same ingredients in a different direction and works for breakfast as readily as for a snack.
For a main course, think of peas as the green element that finishes a dish rather than a side serving. Stir them through pasta with cream, onion, butter, lemon and hard cheese; fold them into a quick risotto; or add them at the end of a rice pilaf with warm spices and a fried egg on top. They also sit comfortably in curries — a spiced pea and potato coconut curry, for example — and in a pea, herb and mozzarella pie with leeks, where they bring sweetness against the richer filling.
None of this requires a special shopping trip, which is the point. If there is a bag in your freezer, tonight's dinner already has a vegetable in it. The pea's problem was never flavour; it was being treated as an afterthought. Giving it the central role in one meal a week would be a small, cheap way to start reversing that 37-gram figure.
Source: The Guardian