EVERYONE loves an airy morning at the farmers’ market blowing a week’s wages on two items. But what the f**k have these got to do with farms?
Fudge
Whether your farmers’ market is in Cheshire, Islington or Glasgow, one thing’s for sure: you’re nowhere near a sugar cane plantation. There simply isn’t the climate. So that fudge, competitively priced at just £3.75 for a tiny, tiny bag, is as locally sourced as the Range Rover it’s sold from.
Booze
You’ve just had a free sample of a pleasant but disappointingly low-alcohol liqueur from a dizzyingly wide range. But in what way are they farmed? Are there goats being fed nothing but fermented plums and cinnamon then being milked into bottles?
Seafood
Ask the person at the stall if this lobster’s been farmed. ‘No,’ they’ll reply, aghast, ‘all our fish are caught wild by a small fleet of day boats on the Norfolk coast.’ Suggest if they’re so horrified by the very thought of farming perhaps they should f**k off somewhere else.
Cakes
Not farmed. Made of farmed produce but so are Pringles. No farmer is sowing rows with flour and sugar and then harvesting a bumper crop of vanilla slices come September. Nobody’s plucking old-fashioned treacle tarts from a vine. They’re made in an industrial kitchen in Kettering.
Coffee beans
To be fair these are from a farm, but not within a thousand miles of the market in Ipswich they’re being sold at. The person selling them is not their farmer. Travelling here from Vietnam to sell you the beans would not be remotely cost-effective, even at these prices.
Hand-crafted greetings cards
It’s hard to imagine a farmer even sending a greetings card. It just seems like spending your days mucking out pigs before sending them off to slaughter would tear away the illusions of life’s niceness that greetings cards are designed to maintain. It goes without saying they don’t f**king make them.
