Julie Bindel Julie Bindel

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. But so what? No one can tell the difference between that and a plastic-wrapped offering from Aldi if it were stripped of its packaging.

There is a sense from some farmer’s market devotees that they are somehow doing the environment, and poor people, the world of good by spending obscene amounts of easily earned cash on a bag of posh tomatoes. They can be heard bragging, as they queue for their double-filtered Ethiopian coffee, that they are handing their dosh straight into the hands of those tasked with providing food for the nation.

But these farmers are nothing like the hard-working, hard-up manual labourers that struggle to make ends meet. These are the public school-educated fancy-pant lot who are appealing to snobbery and elitism. For many of them, it’s just a hobby. And

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