Last week I was in a branch of Greggs, in the small market town in north Wiltshire where I live. Behind the sausage rolls, steak bakes, corned beef pasties and trays of vanilla slice was something that almost made me drop my Tesco meal deal in shock. A machine dispensing matcha lattes. 

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Greggs, the last bastion of brown food in the post-Ottolenghi era is now retailing aspirational green, radioactive TikTok slurry … in Wiltshire. A cheerful, democratic, brute-force provider of cheap calories in culturally legible form has collided with a beverage whose main function is performative wellness. It felt less like innovation than a stitching error. Two incompatible worlds roughly bolted together, animated despite never quite cohering. 

I think I must have been staring at the matcha machine for longer than was strictly necessary when the old boy behind me also looked at it. 

‘Is it mint?’ he asked the woman behind the counter. No. ‘Pistachio?’ No. He frowned.  

‘Right,’ he said, and ordered a tea and a cheese-and-onion pasty. 

Which raises a basic but unvoiced question. What, exactly, is matcha? For anyone who has been living under a rock for the past five years, (or who has had the good sense not to........

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