Save me from the farmer's market

I've just walked past one, and I'm a bit cross

My friend Cathy once paid £12 for a small bag of green beans from an organic deli because she ‘wanted to support local businesses’. But this shop, in trendy Crouch End, a leafy north London suburb, was actually part of a chain of organic rip-off merchants, filled with over-priced fruit and vegetables, half eaten by snails. The owners were raking it in from idiots who had this mad idea that the shop was there to ‘serve the community’. It existed to make the owners very rich off the backs of folk with more money than sense.

Ditto farmers’ markets. A few minutes walk from the green bean shop is the place that the urban, monied middle classes go to cruise other urban, monied middle classes. These people, often affecting the appearance of country-dwellers, are so pleased with themselves for buying food with no carbon footprint. The sellers crow about the fact that the cabbages were picked fresh from Kent that morning, but so what? No-one can tell the difference between that and a plastic-wrapped offering from Aldi if it were stripped of its packaging and placed alongside the hand-reared ones.

There is a sense from some farmer’s market devotees that they are somehow doing the environment, and poor people, the world of good by spending obscene amounts of easily earned cash on a bag of posh tomatoes. They can be heard bragging, as they queue for the double filtered Ethiopian coffee, that they are handing over their dosh straight into the hands of those tasked with providing food for the nation. But these farmers are nothing like the hard-working, hard-up manual labourers that struggle to make ends meet. These are the public school-educated lot who are appealing to snobbery and elitism. For many of them it is a hobby, and the customers are as smug and self-satisfied a group you will ever meet.

Farmer’s market fans walk around looking so pleased with themselves because they are doing their shopping outdoors, clutching natural-fibre reusable bags, rather than in an enclosed area with commoners buying reduced-price tins. The double buggies abound, and there are plenty of spoilt, badly behaved children running around amongst the Lebanese pastries. Pretty much everything on sale in these places is all wildly overpriced, ergo, only over-privileged, time-rich individuals can afford to buy it. Indeed, I could take along a load of crap in a hessian basket, woven by impoverished Guatemalan peasants, and clear up within five minutes. If the actual peasant was selling it directly it would not work; those peddling goods at the markets have to be as posh as the people they are serving. But half the time the customers do not see themselves as doing the food shopping, more like saving the planet and securing a place in secular heaven.

All normal shopping protocols are obsolete in famers’ markets. The more mud on the potatoes, misshapen the apples and cracked the terracotta pots the better. The fake-farmers selling you the tat are inevitably rude and superior, managing to give you the impression that you should be grateful that they arrived in their shiny Chelsea tractor packed with food you could buy for an eighth of the price in your local supermarket. Yes, the much-derided place that makes it easier for older, disabled and hard-up people to buy a weekly shop and that actually provides jobs to people who need them. 

The food snob today won’t win any friends or impress colleagues by bragging about the beautiful artisan loaf they paid £6 for at the farmer’s market, but if they mention the deli section at a cut-price supermarket, and how 12 bottles of cloudy apple juice cost less than a piano lesson, they will.

The sheer snobbery of the market dwellers makes me run to the nearest Bargain Booze, via Morrisons. Maybe these people will think twice about insisting on only eating organic when they find themselves out of a job or facing a pay cut, whilst those selling the swag will be laughing all the way to their farmhouse in France for a well-deserved break from ripping off.