Easy to mock

In preparation for a light jog through Bloomsbury and Fitrovia to Marylebone Farmers Market, he donned his Nike windcheater and collected his hessian bag from Stroud Farmers Market. Of course he didn't shop at Nike these days, but somehow the brown bag, with its Hayles Fruit Farm logo, counteracted any negative vibes that the Nike apparel might throw off. He had managed to pull off a mix of '90s brand aspirationalism and, er, 2000s brand aspirationalism.

It's easy to mock farmer's markets, going organic and all the other food fashions of middle-class Britain in the twenty-first century, but I can't help but feel that something good is going on here. Jogging to the market my dominant thought was how nice it was to live in a city full of markets and how Sunday has gone from being one of my least favourite days of the week to perhaps my favourite, and how nice a sense of community you get from markets in the city.

Whilst at the market I was on the lookout for celebs and trying to avoid getting poked in the eye by unthinking assholes with giant umbrellas, and on the way back I got to musing on pricing in farmers markets. My guess is that if farmers markets are ever to move beyond being a Sunday treat for the middle classes, then they're going to have to think about pricing in quite a serious way. The one item in the market which crystallised this thought was asparagus, which is of course in season at the moment. Now I know that if I were to go up to Chapel Street Market in Islington (a regular as opposed to a farmers market) I'd pay either £1 or £1.50 for a bunch of British asparagus, whilst I guess that the same thing would be around £1.79 or £2 in a supermarket. At Marylebone it varied between £2 and £3.50. The latter price is just a joke in my book and a real two-fingers to consumers, whilst the former price, which I'd consider to be reasonable for a really great product, is revealing of just how unwilling stallholders in farmers markets are to look at competitors and price accordingly. Now I'm no poster-boy for free markets, but there's a good reason why in a traditional market, more or less all fruit and veg can be found at roughly the same price, with perhaps a divergence of 30-50% max, and quite often within a range of 10-20%. The same cannot be said for farmers markets where many seem to see it as an opportunity to price at what they regard as being the highest possible price that people will pay, reasoning that there is a middle-class feelgood premium which allows them to charge prices which people would not consider elsewhere. What's more we ought to remember that these steep prices are being charged without any middleman taking a cut, so I have little sympathy with those who use farmers markets as a means to raking in excessive profits and ignoring the long-term future of both their businesses and markets in general.

Now this may seem pretty harsh, but the fact is that by shopping on a budget - which I'm obliged to do - I still had a great time at the market and I simply ignored the £3.50 asparagus outlets and the places that charge for salad by the 100g, as if dopey old William is going to fall for that trick. Instead I followed the crowds to the super-duper Manor Farms where all the vegetables are ready-sorted into bunches and boxes, so you know exactly how many giant field mushrooms you'll get for £1.50 (three), how much that punnett of peas will be (£1.20), quanta costa a giant cucumber (80p) and that carrots are 10p each. Now some of these prices are rather more than a regular market but realistically they're pretty similar to those found in supermarkets and I'd much rather give my cash to the farmer and let them have the cut normally demanded by Tesco's. I bought some beautiful looking red and white radishes from them for 80p too and I must say that I'm really looking forward to a lunch based on this haul. I'd also single out Perry Court Farm of Bilting in Kent for praise. I've bought delicious English apples from them in the past and sought them out to get some tiny little Red Pippins, all bagged-up so that I could see that I was getting seventeen apples for my £1.50. The assistant then asked if I fancied a bag of pears on a two bags for £2.50 deal and I went for that after tasting their truly luscious Conference pears. Now I'm slightly funny about pears usually because I like them hard and flavourless, but I even I could tell that these juicy, perfumed fruit were top banana, as they say, so I took the deal and felt I was getting great value. Last-up I bought some raisin rye bread from the Exeter Street bakery for £2.50. Now you may well be right in thinking that the name played a seductive role here, but there was also another good reason why I was prepared to pay extra for a bread which I regard as being the best style of bread in the world as an accompaniment to cheese which is this: the guy was also selling other breads for a quid and on tasting them and the raisin bread it was clear to me that he wasn't pricing the bread that I wanted at the higher price simply because he could, but because this was a pricier bread to make and as a customer you made your choice between a set of products where you could be reasonably sure that the profit margins were comparable across the range.

Now this may seem a pretty mean-spirited attitude on the part of this consumer, but I like farmers markets a great deal and I want to imagine that they can continue to grow and grow so that they become a daily presence on the streets of big cities and little villages, but what I don't want is a situation like that in France - where such things really are a daily fixture but the prices induce a nose-bleed pretty quickly. There there seem to be plenty of punters willing to fork out a hefty premium artisanale, but I tend to think people are mugs for doing so because if farmers markets here are ever really to democratise food production, they can't sustain the variable levels of pricing seen at present and the promotion of niche, luxury goods. A bunch of asparagus just isn't the same as a Porsche or a Tag-Heuer (or whatever the contemporary emblems of dope consumerism are); in the end it's a green vegetable that should cost about a quid fifty a bundle. If you want to drizzle yours in first crop Villa Versace olio, fine, but bog-standard supermarket olive oil and some salt will do me fine.