Читать книгу Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table - Nigel Slater - Страница 25

Home to the locally grown and hand harvested, the farmers’ market fills the gap between allotment and supermarket. I shop there because I want to meet the people who grow what I eat, to experience the joy of seasonal shopping, to be as close as I can to where my food originates from without actually getting my hands in the soil.

The farmers’ market works on several levels. It appeals to my need for those who supply my food to have a face rather than to be part of a vast, invisible food machine; it provides an opportunity to buy produce that was picked hours rather than days or even weeks ago; it supports local workers and encourages me to ‘do my bit’ to cut down ‘food miles’. At last, I can put my pound directly into the weathered hand of the person who planted, watered and then dug up the pink fir-apple potatoes I am about to turn into a salad.

And I suspect that, as I trundle up the hill with my recycled bag of cheap corn on the cob still in its fresh green husks and a swaying bunch of three-foot-high sunflowers, it probably allows me to feel just a wee bit smug about those shoppers with their supermarket packet of identically sized, overpriced, cellophane-wrapped green beans from Mozambique.

There are 350 farmers’ markets in Britain at the time of writing, from Aberystwyth to York. Dorset alone has ten, London a measly fourteen. Pushed from pillar to post, they find a temporary home wherever the local council will let them set up shop, in school playgrounds, village squares and, ironically, supermarket car parks. The bustling square with its jam-and-‘Jerusalem’ stalls and green striped parasols is the twenty-first-century replacement for the local outdoor market. The selfsame market that closed down a decade ago, when it could no longer muster the strength to do battle with the invaders from planet Sainsbury. Coming to town just once a week, this colourful gaggle of brave traders in everything from unpasteurised cream to lavender-coloured aubergines has something of the circus about it. We gather round the stalls in awe, gasping at the beauty of a cloth-wrapped truckle of cheddar or a wicker hamper of downy field mushrooms picked at dawn. The farmers’ market has become the modern equivalent of a band of travelling minstrels.