Pat's Guide to the Farmers' Market

If you’re anything like me, sometimes you need to buy food. Supermarkets are great for packaged items, hygiene products and cigarettes, but for fresh produce, we must embrace the farmers’ market. You see, supermarkets think they can charge whatever nonsense price for apples that aren’t quite good enough to sell to the Japanese. They’ll sell you a cucumber for $4. Four dollars! For a watery log that you’ll never notice until your Dad puts it in your sandwiches because you’ve run out of Milky Way spread and it’ll ruin your month, but you still have to eat it because you can’t go outside until you’ve eaten everything in your lunchbox because school is fascism!

I believe it was Adam Smith, the inventor of economics, who said “When I’m a-philaderin’, I always bring a mandarin.” He also said this thing: “I buy all of my fresh produce - mandarins included - at the farmers’ market. It simply cannot be bestened for value.” Whether or not “bestened” is truly a word, the sentiment rings true. For value, the market is your new king.

But you can’t just wander into a farmers’ market unprepared. The savings could quite literally murder you in your sleep. Not to worry, however, I’ve put together this comprehensive five-step guide to shopping at the local market.

1. You’ve gotta have “A Guy”

See this guy?

He’s my cherry guy. He sells me only the finest cheapest cherries. I know what you’re thinking: why don’t you just buy big bumper packs of cupcakes, eat the cherry off the top, and throw the  cupcake in the rubbish as a celebration of opulence? Believe me, before the GFC, I had no idea that cherries were available as a stand-alone product. Times have changed. Screw you Madoff.

We’re coming up to winter here in Paris, so the cherry well has well and truly dried up. Luckily, when we’re out of cherry season, my cherry guy becomes my clementine guy. He sells me only the finest cheapest clementines. And he sells them with a smile. Well, not really a “smile”, but he sometimes calls me ‘chef’, which means ‘chief’, not ‘chef’, and he probably patronises me because he respects me so much.

2. If you’re buying horse meat, buy from the best

Obviously. We’re at the end of the Northern Hemisphere racing season, so it’s a great time to shop around for horse meat. Horses are majestic creatures, and their flesh is rich in nobility. You might never be a lord or a viscount (whatever that is), but you can eat like an earl or a count. Count me in!

We should all eat horse, if only as a method of population control. Horses hate us. They’ve taken down some of humanity’s greatest: they got Superman; they got Geronimo; they got Genghis; they got Theoden in LOTR; they got Roderick, King of the Visigoths. They even got Eadgils, “the semi-legendary king of Sweden.” [One day I’ll donate to Wikipedia]. If we don’t eat horses, who will they get next? Richie? I don’t bloody think so.

Top tip: Unlike unicorns, a horse’s meat does not contain any supernatural properties, so you’ll want to supplement this meat with about twice your daily Centrum dosage.

Bonus top tip: Ask your horse guy whether the jockey was right- or left-handed. You want to make sure you’re getting your horse steak from the whip side, as it comes pre-tenderised.

3. Make yourself sound smarter by pretending to know about fish

This is actually a good idea for many of your produce purchases. Just the other day, I had this exchange with my melon guy:

Me: “Say, you don’t happen to have any Moroccan melons, do you?”

Melon guy: “Yes sir, all of our melons come from Morocco.”

Me: “I thought so. That’s why I asked."

Now, we all know that the important part of a melon is how long it can sit in your pantry once you’ve forgotten about, before the fruit flies arrive (aka ‘the pumpkin rule’), but the point is I impressed the melon guy. He even asked me to marry his daughter. [He didn’t ask me that, and if you thought he did, you’re a bigger racist than me (and I’m the one who wrote it)].

When you’re at the fish stall, it always pays to turn to the person next to you and make some bold comment about being surprised at the price of gurnard these days. Don’t worry, they don’t know which one gurnard is either, but they’ll respond with some inconsequential remark about tilapia, and you’ll both rush home to over/under cook your catch and feed it to your resenting families. The thing is, buying fish is almost exactly like buying wine. You look at the price, then you look at how much it has been marked down by, then you buy two bottles/kilos because “I can’t believe how cheap this Beaujolais/grouper is,” even though you have no idea how much it should cost normally.

Truth is, only Dads really know the names of fish. And they only really know the names of two or three, and then they just make something up to impress the children who do all the heavy fishing (ie, hold the rod and try to stay awake). Dads will probably tell you that they “love a snapper”, or “I’m a kahawai guy”, which is similar to when people say “I only smoke Lucky Strikes”- it’s true, but only until Pall Malls are 50c cheaper a pack. As long as Dads can lob it straight on the barbecue, that fish will do.  

4. Appear interested in the expensive stuff that you have no intention of purchasing

A weird thing is happening at the market these days. For some reason, it’s transitioning from a place where people shove past one-another, hoping to snag a few bargains before hurrying home to their Sunday hangovers, to a place where people just stand around, eating “gourmet” things and listening to “musicians”. I personally think that these “vendors” are taking up perfectly good produce real estate, but some people seem to like ‘em.

Why not pick up a can of fancy foie gras? Don’t buy it, of course. You’re here for carrots, avocados, capsicums and the like.  Just look at it, nodding sagely as you peruse the ingredients (if the duck’s tears aren’t included, it’s not authentic foie).

You could even have an oyster or six, straight from the shell. Perhaps enjoy a dry Gewürztraminer, hoping like hell that the sugars in the wine will kill the vibrio bacteria before you board your flight later that day. Of course, you won’t do these things, because carrots, capsicums, etc. The point is, you aren’t an out-of-control bourgeois type, but you can pretend to be for these precious minutes.

5. Run home with your new produce, because it’s probably already gone off

Yeah, sometimes you aren’t getting the créme de la créme, as my Italian friends say. But with prices like these, who cares?

Smile, you’re a market guy now.