THE RISING price of food is the top topic of conversation in Riga right now - at least among the non-chattering classes. Expensive milk and bread hits the poorest hardest. Combine that with angry farmers being squeezed by the supermarkets from one side and fearful of the prospect of a reformed Common Agricultural Policy on the other, and there is the makings of a food crisis.

While everyone on the street is talking about food, there’s been surprisingly little comment from the people running the country. The brunt of the farmers’ ire is the owner of parliament’s most luxuriant moustache, Agriculture Minister Martins Roze, ironically enough from the Greens’ and Farmers’ Union. He faces a no-confidence vote as part of a spectacular parliamentary triple-bill on June 29.

The only real advice given to shoppers came courtesy of PM Godmanis prior to cracking his cranium in a car accident (always wear your seatbelt). Godmanis suggested that the public should make use of wholseale as well as retail outlets. It says an awful lot about the mindset of the government that the best they can do to help consumers avoid the high prices of the Rimi/Maxima supermarket duopoly is to tell them to buy in bulk.

It’s a great suggestion - as long as you have a large car or van, a decent cash surplus, some strong helpers to lug the sacks of flour around, a large, preferably chilled storage facility at home and prefer freeze-dried, pre-packed, canned and pasteurised mass-produced, additive-enriched rubbish to fresh fruit and veg.

It’s a shame no-one in government took the opportunity to promote a national asset that really could help with food prices - the markets.

Latvia is blessed with some fantastic markets. The Central Market is spectacular and a deserved tourist attraction, with each pavillion assaulting the senses with its smells and sights. But even better are Riga’s other markets, of which Vidzeme and Agenskalns are my personal favourites. And each regional town has its own market where locally-produced fruit and veg costs a fraction of what you’d pay for the second-grade Dutch or Spanish stuff in the supermarkets.

The produce is cheap, it’s in season, you can sample it, choose what you want and ask for advice on how to cook or store it from the experts, with whom you develop an acquaintance after a few visits. Often you are dealing with the producer direct, cutting out all the middle men. When was the last time you were able to ask a Maxima shelf-stacker which potatoes are good roasters or exactly what they put in their marinade? And when was the last time they threw a couple of extra apples in your bag because it was the end of the day?

A bit more expensive but of an extraordinarily high standard is the Slow Food-inspired market held at Berga Bazars twice a month. It is akin to the Farmers’ Markets that are growing in popularity in the US and UK among shoppers disillusioned with pretty but bland polybagged peppers and dairy products with more plastic packaging than taste. But Latvia is in the happy position of not needing to rediscover real food - it already has it. The danger is that it will throw away this huge asset in the rush to be just as standardised and boring as the suburban norm in ‘developed’ countries.

And it’s a real danger that the markets will disappear. Many here seem to view going to the market instead of the supermarket as an embarrassing admission of poverty or a lack of sophistication. An aspirational young businessperson doesn’t want to be seen talking to an old lady about her secret recipe as it would be bad for their image, in exactly the same way that some people view using public transport instead of your own car as shameful. It’s a silly, self-defeating attitude but ’boutique’ markets like Berga Bazars may help change the perception.

Another criticism is that markets are dirty, maybe because the potatoes and cabbages haven’t been blasted with a chemical cocktail and you can still see which bit of a pig you are actually buying rather than just getting a vaguely pink slab of meat. Such suspicions are doubly dim in view of a series of recent food poisoning outbreaks which were a direct result of the ‘clean’ supermarkets selling produce unfit for human consumption.

So maybe the food crisis will help to drive people back to their local markets. Maybe they will enter furtive and afraid the first time, but once they are standing in the middle of it with the sweet smell of cherries on the left, the aroma of fresh herbs on the right and a man who’s been selling watermelons for 20 years explaining the difference between a good one and a bad one right in front of you, it’s a safe bet they’ll be back.

See you next to the spuds.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.