Turnips, a family run business inside the London food market, attracts visitors from across the world and has built a huge online following with its produce popularised through social media.
But its chocolate strawberries were removed from sale this month after Borough Market officials allegedly told traders that they do not regard them as “fruit, veg and related produce”.
Is it mattocks you use to deal with turnips? Could have a dual use, no?
One can understand the problem though. If you widen the definition of fruit, veg & related to include chocolate covered strawberries, does that let in a stall vending cheap pseudo -sugar loaded chewy candies a la pakishop? One wonders how they handled toffee-apples when fruiterers still sold them. Reading the article, the choc-strawbs are back on the stall, so it looks like they’ve squared the circle.
Reminds me of going to the Ally Pally “Farmers Market”. Supposed to be locally grown, natural, organic yadda yadda. It’s just a load of middle class tossers selling fakes to other middlo-class tossers. What’s locally grown, natural & organic about plastic wrapped biltong at 2 quid a strip? Also the “traditional” market at St Antonin Noble Val & its “locally grown tomatoes” much bought by the Brit second-homers. The box underneath the back of the stall was labelled “Almeria”. Our Costa del Plastico. Tomatoes in the Tarn in May? Do us a favour! At least the Boro’ retains some sort of cred.
Come to think of it, I think you’ve got this back to front. The council are worth their jobs. They’re trying to run the market for the benefit of the established market traders. Now that takes you right back to when a town’s traders were its “local authority”. When trading was was the purpose of towns.
It’s the reverse of the modern norm. Where a towns traders are victims of the local authority, squeezed for every cent can be made out of them whilst being despised for having the temerity to make a profit.
Everything is locally grown, it’s just that the locale may not be near the customer.
Watching Clarksons Farm suffering because some of the items on sale (coffee, T shirts and caps) weren’t sourced within 30 miles of the farm, was the epitome of the small minded jobsworth mentality here in the UK.
It isn’t EU legislation (and remember, most of the EU just fucking ignores EU legislation), it was the cunts in this country who love this shit and the power it confers to them.
Addolff,
Those are the rules in twee Cotswold bits. Lots of people want to live in a museum and elect councillors who will create the bullshit aura and rules. If he was just the other side of Burford he wouldn’t have needed to follow any of that.
I am torn as my default classical liberal “let it all rip” leads to only one thing in these places. It’s done it to my local paradise for purveyors of produce to the picky as surely as it has done to lots of classic European markets.
It is a particular pestilence on cities with high tourist throughput.
That one thing is that gradually every place accommodating provenders specialising in weird cheeses, veg, that spice place where you can literally get everything, and a wide selection of prosciutto, gets turned into a juice/coffee/prosecco/chocolate-covered strawberry place catering to transient tourists who want to instagram a selfie with the cult comestible. Or, often as not, just a selfie in front of the place selling it. Every time you go back and another one has fallen and there is another horde of tourists gawping at BiG Cityers doing their weekly grocery shop.
The market has spoken, I guess, but where does the market get displaced to when the market speaks? It doesn’t. It just disappears.
The “Borough Market officials” obviously don’t come under the rule of Genghis, who would, I imagine, take the banning of something brown on the outside but with a red heart as a personal affront…