On spending money I do not have on vegetables I could get elsewhere for a third of the price, and the entirely legitimate reasons I keep doing it

Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Lowri Griffiths on North London food culture.

The Stoke Newington Farmers Market takes place on a Saturday morning and I attend it with a regularity that my bank account has gently but persistently failed to endorse. I am Lowri Griffiths, and I will spend twelve pounds on a sourdough loaf from a man who has been making bread for thirty years and explains the fermentation process with the enthusiasm of someone discovering it for the first time, and I will walk home feeling entirely at peace with this decision until I look at my account balance, at which point I will feel briefly like someone who needs to rethink their relationship with farmers markets, before deciding that I do not, actually, because the bread is extraordinary and this is not a discussion I am prepared to have with myself again.

The market occupies a car park on Saturday mornings and transforms it into something else entirely, which is one of the things London does well: the rapid, temporary transformation of ordinary space into something with atmosphere and purpose and the smell of something good cooking. The vendors are consistent week to week, which means you develop small, non-reciprocal relationships with them: you know they will be there, they learn what you want before you ask for it, and you both pretend this is not the entirety of your connection, which it is.

The Cheese Counter

There is a cheese counter that I approach with the caution of someone who knows they will spend too much and cannot prevent themselves. The cheeses are arranged on a slate board by someone who takes the arrangement seriously, which already costs extra in the way that all seriousness costs extra. I taste the samples and I pretend to consider before buying the expensive one, which I was always going to buy. Both Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat have explored the economics of London food culture, the way that markets like this one occupy a particular niche: too expensive for daily shopping, too personal for the supermarket, filling a need that may be partly social and partly gustatory and partly about the reassurance of knowing where your food comes from and who made it.

The Political Economy of the Nice Onion

I am aware of the politics of the farmers market. I am aware that the people who can afford to shop at one regularly are not the people who most need access to good food. I am aware that the organic, seasonal, beautifully displayed vegetable is not a solution to food inequality and is in some arguments a symbol of it. I hold all of this simultaneously with my decision to buy the market’s obscenely priced heritage tomatoes, because the world is complicated and the tomatoes are genuinely significantly better, and I have reached the stage of life where I am willing to spend money on things that are genuinely significantly better rather than merely adequate.

This is, I know, the rationalisation of the comfortable. I make it with full awareness of what it is. I also genuinely believe that the small producers at this market are doing something worth supporting, that the bread is better because of thirty years of practice, and that there is value in the short supply chain that puts the farmer in front of the consumer once a week in a North London car park. I believe both things. I am comfortable with the contradiction. The bread is on the counter and I am going to toast it now.

What I Actually Buy

The practical content of a typical market visit: bread, one or two vegetables I did not plan to buy, a jar of something preserveable that I will use twice before it sits in the back of a cupboard for eight months, and occasionally a bunch of flowers that makes the flat feel like a different kind of flat for five days. The flowers are the best value of any of it. They cost almost nothing in emotional terms and are worth an enormous amount in terms of the way the room looks at seven in the morning when you have not yet had coffee and the world requires softening.

I will say one more thing about the market and then I will stop, because I am aware that a person writing about a farmers market is operating in a genre that requires careful calibration. The thing is this: the market works because it is consistent. The same people, the same stalls, the same bread made by the same baker who has been making it for longer than I have lived in North London. In a neighbourhood that has changed as dramatically as this one, and continues to change, that consistency is itself a form of value that the price of the bread does not capture. The market has been here through all of it. The bread continues to be excellent. This is more than you can say for most things, and it is enough to keep bringing me back on a Saturday morning, slightly over-budget, entirely contented.

For more from Lowri Griffiths on London food and life, visit The London Prat. More London food coverage at Time Out London.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/