I’m always a bit alarmed these days at the supermarket, which I visit as infrequently as possible, to see people loading up their bags with loads of pre-processed food, soft drink and bright red supermarket meat – it reminds me that a way of eating that I thought was long gone is alive and well and chewing through carbon.
You probably think that makes me a food snob and to a certain extent, I suppose it does. I buy most of our fresh fruit and vegetables from the La Cigale market – it’s not quite a farmers market, but it’s a nice halfway. The vege stand there is brilliant: it’s run by a ma and pa operation who get all their stuff direct from the growers and who are constantly sourcing new and exciting types of produce.
I always stop by first at Sally’s Veges – Sally farms out at Kumeu and grows the most amazing produce in Auckland, spray-free, picked the evening before or even that morning and superb. It actually has taste and increasingly, I buy most of my stuff from her. There’s also an old Serbian guy who grows his own superb tomatoes and capsicums and who occasionally slips me a shot of his homemade liqueur, so I sort of float around the market in a slight alcoholic daze.
What got me thinking about this again recently was the Green Party’s survey of growers, which claimed to show how much growers were getting squeezed by the supermarkets. To an extent, they were right: there’s a determined move by Progressives, at least, to only deal with one supplier and to harmonise prices.
But I thought the approach was simplistic, to be honest: agriculture is a huge business these days and the supermarkets are dealing with massive suppliers in the main – the food in your supermarket is part of an industrial supply chain that seeks to remove any sense of seasonability and, in doing so, even out the prices year round. I was shocked this year when I found capsicums at the height of summer selling for $1.99 each – I pay $2 a kilo from my Serbian guy and I ge a drink thrown in too!
But the supermarkets aren’t buying from each grower one by one – they’ve long been locked out and have sought other avenues to sell. These days, the supermarkets only control 60 per cent of the fresh market between them, and that’s dropping. The reality is, there are two trends emerging: a massive, industrial supply chain on the one hand and more direct purchasing and distribution through markets and small independents on the other. Long may it continue, I say – and the more we buy from markets, the more we’ll be putting money into the pockets of the people that actually do the work.
When I had a chat with Wallace about this on the wireless the other day, he challenged me with a question: what family with kids and a tight budget can afford to spend Saturday morning down the market?
I schlubbed the question and only realised afterwards that the answer was two-fold. Firstly, there’s a huge amount of waste from the industrial supply chain – veges get old, they go off, either in the store itself or, more likely, in the fridge. A huge proportion of food is wasted each and every day in this country because we’re all so addicted to the big supermarket shop.
And secondly, how much do you value your health and your diet? Surely, even for people on a budget, that’s the most important thing? As an example, we feed the two of us on $120 a week all up. For that, we usually get at least six dinners and plenty of leftovers. I don’t think that’s too bad going and for a long time, we only spent $100 – we recently increased the budget to allow for buying expensive stuff every now and then, cheese and a bit of meat now that we eat that more often.
My only concern with markets in this country has traditionally been that they’ve had one meagre vege stall and three people selling olive oil – but the balance seems to be shifting and people like La Cigale are working really hard to get seasonal growers in, which is great to see. The best thing, though, is having a chat with whoever is on the stall – ask them how to cook whatever they’re selling, how to prepare it. It’s fun, and it’ll get you into food you’d never even considered. And if you’ve got kids, take them too.
No sure where to look? There’s a good site here: www.farmersmarkets.org.nz