going to the market

Not only were our previous wwoof hosts less friendly than we might have liked, but I suspect that their organic farm was just a cover, a sideshow that allowed them to foist possibly non-organic produce off on the unsuspecting market-going people of Piedmont. Since I don't understand any Italian, I don't really know how the farm marketed itself, but it never made sense to us that the farm could survive by selling the peppers, hazelnuts, and the mostly rotten tomatoes that we picked every day. It also didn't seem like there was really a need for the husband to go to market FOUR times a week. I mean, we were picking things every day, but our hosts didn't show any interest in what we picked and they certainly didn't act as if their livelihoods were at stake.

So when I was informed at dinner that for the next two days at 5 am(!!) I would be accompanying the husband to market, I was eager to see how things worked.

We packed the van before going to bed and left right at 5 am.  We pulled in to the market at 5:20 and for the next hour, I unloaded boxes while the husband set up two large tables: the vegetables (which I believed were home-grown) on the left and fruit (I had no idea where that came from) on the right. At this point, it was about 6:30, I thought we were pretty much ready to go.

The market consisted of a large covered area and an adjacent parking lot. We were set up under the awning, where the stalls were smaller, run mostly by elderly folks who came in vans or trucks. We had the biggest table under the awning. The husband was the only working age male selling anything, and certainly the only one with any "help," if I even counted.

 Out in the parking lot, the stands were much bigger and more professional looking. These people came in semi-trucks, brought their own umbrellas, and displayed the produce on an angle, using cardboard boxes- like, you know, the grocery store. There are also young people working them. At some point, a teenager wheeled three handcart-loads full of fruit over to us, and we started loading them onto our tables. Which explains where they got the fruit- Cari and I had been beginning to suspect that there were whole fields that they had just forgot to mention to us. But the new fruit didn't look like the stuff we had been picking. It was washed. It came in new (sometimes plastic) crates, with molded plastic beds keeping each perfect peach or pear unbruised. Most heartbreakingly, there were giant, flawless tomatoes which we placed on top of the stack, hiding the dirty, malformed, and tired ones we had spent the last week picking. Several other (more indi-looking, at least) gentlemen pulled up in their trucks and brought us more crates: vegetables of every kind- which, again, unlike ours, were washed.

We mixed all of this new produce with what we already had, transferring everything into deep, naturalistic piles in wooden crates and even, I am sorry to say, removing stickers from the beautiful peaches.



Then the market started- about five hours of standing around, trying to be helpful.  This included some rearranging of the goods, but mostly I just held a bunch of plastic bags ("sacketas") and handed them out to people who looked like they might want something.  This INVARIABLY prompted them to try and speak to me in Italian, and which point I started chanting that I didn't understand Italian.  Very helpful.  It was either that or stand there, literally doing nothing, for 5 hours.  Then we packed everything we brought, plus whatever we picked up, back in the van and did it all again the next day (in a different town).

I understand that re-presenting produce is a legitimate activity, and that it is nice to have the stickers peeled off fruit before you buy it. I can also see the desire to have a breadth of products that no one small farm could provide- maybe nobody will wait in line to buy moldy organic tomatoes if they can't buy pesticide filled apples at the same stall.  But it was depressing how little of our own produce we sold.  In a day where we must have sold 500 or 600 Euros worth of produce, I would say that only 10-20 were from stuff grown on il Cuore Verde.  It would make far more sense for them to end the farming charade and concentrate on their main business in fruit resale.  Only then, they couldn't say that they were an organic farm... and they couldn't get people like us to come and volunteer there.  Not that they had us do anything helpful while there- just picking things that wouldn't be sold.