The Price of Everything but the Value of Nothing

I was a young VSO volunteer when I came in here..

Most Saturdays I go to the local market to stock up for the following week. I don’t often go to one of the big city markets because they are a bit overwhelming. They’re exciting and buzzing and loud and confusing and smelly and colourful and mysterious in their ways. It’s a bit like going round Hampton Court Maze whilst locked in a rugby scrum eating a curry. I’m sure past VSO volunteers have ventured in never to re-appear and, after weeks of wandering, have ended up on the mince counter…

Minimising packaging and display costs

My preference is for a more sedate shopping experience. 70 dirhams (10p) pays for the trolley bus to the local market and there’s a choikhona (tea shop) for a fortifying brew before going in; 3 somoni (40p) for a pot of green tea. The vegetables are excellent. The tomatoes are big, juicy and spicy. The carrots are very oddly shaped but deep orange and meaty. The onions are golden, look like they’ve been plucked from the top of a mosque and carry a sharp punch. I load up with a kilo of potatoes, a kilo of tomatoes, half a kilo of onions, half a kilo of carrots and half a kilo of grapes for 15 somoni (£2). From another stall – I go from stall to stall frowning and feeling the produce pretending I have some idea about what I am doing – I take a bunch of bananas and a kilo of apples for 14 somoni. It’s all organic –the farmers can’t afford chemicals – and there’s no cellophane wrapping or labelling in sight. I know I am paying a little “foreigner premium” – they seem to have sussed me; perhaps because I am the only one in the market wearing a panama hat, smoking a pipe and not discussing the relative merits of water melons in Tajiki – but what the hell, you only live once! I top off the shopping with two rounds of oily bread at one somoni a loaf and then, the pièce de resistance, a whole roast chicken for 20 somoni. A morning’s entertainment and stocks for a few meals all for £7.50.

Fresh bread at the market

The great excitement in our house today however is the opening of a big new supermarket in the Rudaki Plaza, a couple of hundred yards up the road. Despite my provisioning expedition I wander up in the evening. It’s like a small Tesco. There are cold cabinets with pizzas in boxes and snack meals; racks of fizzy drinks and crisps and a deli counter with cheese and fish in plastic wrappers. There’s a wine and spirits section and shelves of beauty products. I buy some chocolate, some fruit juice, some water and some chilled desserts and, before I know it, I’ve spent more on snacks than I spent at the market. Two snickers bars cost the equivalent of a kilo of potatoes plus a kilo of carrots plus half a kilo of onions.

Supermarket at Rudaki Plaza

I don’t want to get grocery-price-obsessive. I don’t normally spend evenings at home curled up by the fire reading Tesco till receipts (not unless the TV is really bad). No, I mention all this because I think it says something worrying about value systems. I’m not sure what it says, but isn’t it strange that you can get excellent, healthy, varied, relatively cheap food from local market traders and yet what people aspire to do is to go to a neon lit, sparkling, sterile, impersonal basement in a tower block to buy branded, packaged, less nutritious food from who knows where for three times the price? Why is this? Are we programmed to be irrational? Is it the power of marketing – is it Mad Men run riot? Or am I over-romanticising the market? After all, where are the health checks and eat-by dates and cellophane wrappers? Is it convenience? I must admit, it’s not that easy to carry around five kilos of fruit and vegetables on a trolley bus whilst balancing a hot roast chicken on your lap – the aroma of which has people all down the aisle glancing surreptitiously - and trying to find 70 dirhams from your pocket. But still, it does seem our times are out of joint…….