Why Markets Matter - Zester Daily

Where You Shop Matters

Markets in the Mediterranean foster a personal relationship to food long forgotten here.

By Clifford A. Wright | Tuesday, 01 December 2009 | 18:08

The Rio San Barnaba Market in Venice, Italy.

Local markets tell a story about people and place and culture. In the Mediterranean, any visitor can glimpse how native people understand and relate to food through a visit to a local market. Today, in the European Mediterranean, supermarkets are well established and they strangle -- not always successfully -- the traditional markets, but it is in the traditional markets, with their quasi-medieval feel, that a story awaits telling.

Given the markets' role in the economic life of the Mediterranean, it seems extraordinary that their history has not been written. Market life in the Mediterranean not only has had an importance for the past thousand years; it is important today. The market is not only where economic life happens, it is where communities and people meet and relate to one another, where they share stories and foods. The markets of the Mediterranean are rich in food and in history.

Not many of us relate the story of markets upon our return from our travels. Maybe that's because Mediterranean markets are such a cacophony of tongues and sensations that one is not sure how to convey the scene without photos. We also encounter unknown foods; rare are the American travelers who can identify whole fish sold in Mediterranean markets because they never encounter whole fish in their own markets.

However, Mediterranean markets are not just about food, they are about the relationships people forge with the bounty of the land, with those who grow and sell them, with one another and how these relationships coalesce into the foundation of a community and exemplify a shared culture that expresses itself through cuisine.

1 of 6

Butchers in the Arab world specialize by animal. Here is a beef butcher in the souk of Aleppo, Syria. All photos by Clifford A. Wright

How different from an American supermarket where the employees ask, by virtue of a corporate directive, whether customers have found everything OK, but are clueless as to the provenance of the food they sell. And if the shoppers haven't found it, they're unlikely to find it, because the supermarket doesn't carry it. In an American supermarket, we never chat with the person next to us about the quality of the vegetables, perhaps because those vegetables are shrink-wrapped and emit no aroma. Perhaps we don't chat because we don't share any common cuisine. The grocer stocking the bin of squash is so far removed from the industrial farm from which the zucchini came that you'd do just as well asking your plumber about the food.

In an American market, the shopper asks the man in the white coat (we can't call him a butcher) how to cook the pre-cut meat labeled with instructions on avoiding bacteria but not on cuisine. What a stunning contrast to the woman I once witnessed in a Cairo market instructing the lamb butcher exactly what piece she wanted from the whole lamb hanging from the large hook.

There are always exceptions. Thanks to farmers markets Americans are beginning to share some ideas about food -- on a gastronomic level, I mean, not politically or in a recipe-sharing way, nor in an ingredient-driven way, but in a culture-driven way. Nevertheless, perhaps because I shop with authority and determination, looking very much like someone who knows what he wants, passersby tend to ask me, "What are you going to do with that?" I love telling them. A young woman saw me buying seven pounds of fava bean pods once and asked curiously. I said, "Oh, I'm going to make this Sicilian dish called fritedda. We make it in the spring with spring peas, the fava beans, young artichokes, scallions, garlic, mint and a vinegar-sugar marinade." She certainly looked fascinated, but for all I know she was thinking: "That's a lot of work," or "Where's Sicily?"

It's important to share food and most important to share it with our children, so they know that chickens don't grow on trees. Therefore, they learn we can grow, cook and eat a great number of plant and animal foods that all have different tastes. Often American children are clueless about the mere concept of what food represents. In the Mediterranean, it is quite different. I would like to see more of that, and there's no better way than having a child pull a vegetable from the ground, wash it, examine it, prepare it and cook it. Suddenly, it is his or her food.

Clifford A. Wright won the James Beard/ KitchenAid Cookbook of the Year award and the James Beard Award for the Best Writing on Food in 2000 for "A Mediterranean Feast."

Truly a Mediterranean Tradition

That is the story of Barcelona: I never froze one thing during my year in the city. Everyday after class I would stop at the Boquería on my way home and buy that night's dinner....Something that's very hard to do when you buy 15 lbs of steak from Costco.

a guest , December 03, 2009

Last Updated on Friday, 04 December 2009 12:29