We can't all shop at the farmers market – a pity, really, because, apart from everything else, it would solve the very 2018 problem of plastic-bag rage.
Farmers markets are a solution to bag rage.
Most farmers market stallholders provide no bags at all, so shoppers already know they need to bring their own (calico, paper, cotton nets, please). It's a pity Coles and Woolworths didn't manage to get that message across before they dropped single-use bags last month.
A week or so ago, our local market featured a stall staffed by a young man who was unloading loose mandarins directly from a car boot into baskets on the counter. You picked a basket, tipped the contents into your shopping jeep, and paid. There was no packaging involved whatsoever.
Another thing the farmers market lacks that the supermarket has is a bottomless supply of produce.
Meanwhile, the potato lady had her son stapling home-made labels to the calico bags she sells her spuds in – to comply, she said, with country-of-origin labelling laws for packaged food (maybe she was kidding). She does appreciate shoppers washing and returning the bags.
Another thing the farmers market lacks that the supermarket has is a bottomless supply of produce: if you get there late you'll find the sourdough bakers down to a few odd pastries, you might miss out on your regular bunch of hakurei turnips, and some weeks there are no mandarins to be had at all. This is a quiet reminder that we can't take the apparent abundance of our food supplies for granted.
It's also a taste of what the world would look like if the counter-culture had won the 1960s: an economy driven by skinny men in woolly hats selling spotty (but delicious) produce, until they run out.
But the counter-culture didn't win, so instead we have the superabundance of suburban megamarkets stocked to the rafters with everything all the time. Industrial production of food delivers on that, but is it sustainable?
We know it is based on terrible waste. A recent report of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN, for example, found that one-third of the global fish catch doesn't get eaten: it's either thrown back into the ocean or rots before it reaches the market, super or otherwise.
After the farmers market, we went to hunt for mandarins in a run-down fruit and veg shop tucked off the busy main road of our northern suburb. We found some at $2 for a one-kilo net, bearing a label from one of the big supermarkets: they were supermarket rejects, which satisfied our middle-class lefty frugal instincts no end.
What's more, they were labelled "misshaped", part of what an ungenerous commentator might call the supermarket's attempt to greenwash food waste by selling ugly produce at a discount.
But even these rejected rejects weren't as ugly as the spotty oranges my neighbour shared from her tree. They weren't easy on the eye, but they were juicy, had zero food miles and came in biodegradable packaging.
The future of food is ugly, and I'm not just talking about insect-protein energy bars.
Matt Holden is an Age columnist.
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