The snobbery of farmers’ markets makes me want to run to the nearest Morrisons

My friend Cathy once paid £9 for a small bag of green beans from an organic deli because she ‘wanted to support local businesses’. But this shop, in trendy Crouch End (a leafy, north London suburb), was actually part of a chain of organic rip-off merchants, filled with over-priced fruit and vegetables half eaten by snails. The owners were raking it in from idiots who had this mad idea that the shop was there to ‘serve the community’. It existed to make the owners very rich off the back of folk with more money than sense.

Ditto farmers’ markets. A few minutes walk from the green bean shop is the place where the urban, monied middle classes go to cruise other urban, monied middle classes. These people, often affecting the appearance of country-dwellers, are so pleased with themselves for buying food with no carbon footprint. The sellers crow about the fact that the cabbages were picked fresh from Kent that morning.