Marketing

Do markets in Provence really sell melons "grown hydroponically in Israel"? So says Michèle de La Pradelle, apparently, in Market Day in Provence, which seems like a ridiculously fascinating book, at least to someone who totally fell for the whole French-markets-have-better-food hoax. What was I thinking? All those berries I ate unwashed, cheeses from which I had to pick out the occasional goat hair, and now this? Behold:

Through his selling setup, the stallholder stages two competing representations of nature: its universal, generous fecundity, but also a more intimate image: the well-tended nook, the lovingly cultivated little garden behind the house....

Moreover, the selection of products here does not follow customer logic —“I need carrots and a bouquet garni for the daube”; “This guy’s got tarragon but not lettuce”—but rather the logic of the gardener torn between constraints of soil and climate, her concern to grow good produce, and her own momentary fancy. To whoever wishes to hear it, the stall recounts the cycle of the seasons (I don’t have strawberries yet; We don’t carry anything wrapped in plastic), the nature of the soil (“The asparagus? It’s from Velleron—it’s all sand down there”), and the gardener’s adventures (I tried pumpkins this year—it worked). Putting a dead rabbit or a bouquet amidst the cabbages, henhouse eggs next to snap peas, a bunch of daffodils close by the raw fava beans; adding a few items gathered wild (a basket of girolle mushrooms, a punnet of blackberries, a few branches of sweet fennel) evokes the multiform activity of the traditional domestic economy.

The piecemeal look of this selling arrangement also strengthens the impression that we are not dealing with a professional tradesman here, but rather with a peasant of the sort Chayanov described, who occasionally comes to sell his surplus on the market....

This arrangement, designed to evoke the peasant economy (which has long since disappeared from the region), is in fact not frequently encountered on the Carpentras market. The small number of stallholders who play this card serve as a reference for the many more whose allusions are so subtle they are not always perceived—gardener’s baskets instead of crates, slates bearing the words “haricots du pays’” [local beans] in clumsy handwriting, bouquets of flowers that here can pass for decoration—or whose knowing winks at the customer allow doubt to subsist: a question like “So you don’t want any of my plums?” is meant to be heard as meaning that the fruit comes from the seller’s own garden.

I've long been suspicious of the trend in all things "organic;" in unfounded fears of genetically-altered tomatoes; in worrying, of all things in the world, whether you are cooking with local, seasonal ingredients. But at the same time, farmers' markets, whether near the Arc de Triomphe or Grand Army Plaza, have always drawn me to them. Aesthetically, they work. They allow you to do your food shopping in a place that doesn't resemble a Citibank, a Staples, a Starbucks. And the idea that the food comes from a farm is charming--I'm not exactly filled with nostalgia for Europe as it once was, but buying goat cheese at a market where, a few stalls down, one can visit with real-life baby goats has a certain appeal. At one market I went to in Paris, there were baby farm animals in a pen. It was so fantastic. Goat cheese, just slightly runny, with a not-too-moldy but thick-ish rind... tiny strawberries... tiny arugula... oh yes. All most excellent, especially if presented on a closed-off Parisian street.

The market fantasy is, in other words, the only old-world fantasy I allow myself. I don't yearn for a time when people with money had class, when everyone knew their place, when the kids weren't like they are today, when gentility and noblesse oblige were the order of the day, when Europe didn't let in all those ferners, when... right. I'm pretty firmly with modernity. Except when it comes to buying food. Raspail market over Fairway any day.

But now, this. The dream is shattered. It's all the same. I can just throw in the (paper) towel and shop at Key Foods. Or even (gasp) D'agostinos. The horror.