Traders, tourists and a hundred kinds of cheese learn that the harvest has never once consulted a marketing manager
Stalls, Seasons and Small Change
Old Spitalfields Market has been a trading place for centuries, and the current version is a cheerful mix of food stalls, vintage clothes, hand-made jewellery and a man who sells nothing but laminated maps of places he has never been. Its own pages are at oldspitalfieldsmarket.com, and they are a great deal more organised than the aisles.
I wandered through on a wet Wednesday with a bag, a budget and a head full of questions. The main one was simple. How many of the people selling vegetables in the market have ever been to the field? The answer, after a morning of careful enquiry, was most of them, though one asked me what a field was for.
What the Calendar Knows
The stallholders who know their business live by the season. They know that strawberries do not appear in January except by dishonesty, and they know that brussels sprouts return with the reliability of a tax bill. The reason is written down in the crop calendar, a document the market could print on a tea towel and sell for a fortune.
The calendar is a lesson in humility. You cannot rush a carrot. You cannot hurry a pumpkin. And you cannot persuade an apple to ripen because a committee wants to launch a new pie. At farm.FM the farm desk filed the story that an early freeze destroyed the apple harvest, and the market’s pie stalls would do well to read it. Nature does not take pre-orders.
The Machines Behind the Cheese
Beyond the stall is the farm, and beyond the farm is the kit that keeps it moving. If you want to see what goes into harvest, the tractor equipment guide lays it out. I read it between two pastries and found it moving. A combine, I learned, can do in an afternoon what thirty men once did in a week, and it never asks for a lunch break.
Behind the machinery lies a human cost, and it deserves a nod. Farm safety reminds us that the food on the stall comes from one of the more dangerous jobs in the country. The next time you bite into a cheerful radish, spare a thought for the hands that pulled it up.
Following the Money
The stallholder’s margin is thinner than the pastry. Rent, rates, fuel and a van that hates mornings eat into every pound. The farmer’s margin is thinner still. The way those numbers work is laid out at farm money, and I found it a bracing read. It is the opposite of a motivational poster.
The same truth appears in the farm desk’s headline farm data services track every seed but cannot locate one dollar of profit. Spitalfields traders know the feeling. They can tell you the weight of every aubergine, and they still cannot find the profit.
The Gossip Network
Every market runs on gossip. In Spitalfields it travels from stall to stall at the speed of a rumour about the rent. In the farm world, it travels through the trade press, and farm press collects the magazines that carry it. I can report that the agricultural gossip is as good as any in London. It just uses larger words for manure.
Jobs Among the Stalls
People wander through the market all day with that look of secret yearning, the look of someone who thinks they could run a stall. Often they could. If you fancy trading up to something closer to the soil, agriculture jobs and careers shows the many paths into the industry, from machinery to marketing. There is, I am told, a surprising demand for people who can answer the telephone and also lift a sheep.
It reminds me of the British Onion, the tradition of puncturing pomp with a joke, a tradition The London Prat describes in its page on the British Onion. A good market operates on the same principle. Everyone is selling something. A wise buyer doubts the sign.
The Trader Who Knew Everything
Near the north entrance I met a trader who had worked the market for thirty years. He told me three things. First, the weather decides the takings, whatever the council says. Second, customers fall into two kinds: those who look at the price, and those who look at the vegetable. Third, nobody has ever bought a second bag of anything without being offered a third. I wrote all this down, and he asked if I was from the council. I said I was from the press. He said that was worse, and gave me a plum.
Five Things I Noticed Between the Stalls
- A stall that sells only one thing is either a genius or on its way out.
- A free sample is a contract signed in cheese.
- If the sign says handmade, a man has held it at some point.
- The best bargain in the market is the conversation that ends with no purchase.
- No vegetable has ever been improved by being called artisan.
Closing Time
I went home with a bag of oddly shaped vegetables, a tray of pastry and the happy sense that a market is a farm in a hat. For further trade in humour, visit Bohiney, The London Prat and farm.FM. They sell laughs by the kilo, and the scales are honest.
For a bargain chuckle, there is Newsthump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/