How best to buy food: Supermarket v Street Market

John Harris - food, knowledge, experience

Photo Credit Nick Dawe

For many, a supermarket is the preferred choice for a weekly shop. However, should we place more faith in our farmers and stall holders? Or is the preference for a safety net making the nation "food illiterate"?John Harris explores the choice

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Buying the right food is the first stage to making a great meal, weather for family, friends or customers.Understanding how best to do this is key to producing something great, or alternatively pretty mediocre. For however much of an accomplished cook you are, if you start with poor quality raw materials you'll end up with, at best, a disappointing plate of food.In the UK we are pretty much addicted to our supermarkets for all our daily requirements from apples to loo rolls - the majority of our purchasing power is spent in one of the big four chains. The question is: does it give us the best results?As far as convenience is concerned, being able to walk in at one end and come out the other with plastic bags full of day-to-day goodies is on the face of it good value and pretty handy. We have the most sophisticated supermarkets in the world, according to their respective PRs, pandering to our every whim so surely it must be great?Harking back to the days of the corner shop providing all our needs (like Open All Hours with Arkwright trying to stock everything that any of his customers might need, want or not), well they didn't really work like that! The stock held was very limited and your choice was either buy it or don't. Now we are at the other extreme. I found myself recently standing in the toothpaste aisle gazing at over 50 options to squeeze onto my little brush and scrub my pearly whites. Do we really need that many options?

Tomatoes at Turnips in Borough Market

Supermarkets are convenient no argument, but are they going to give us the best food?

If supermarkets were using all their immense buying power to provide us with the best that is available it would be great. But they are businesses, not benevolent societys, and as we all know a business needs to make money; and for supermarkets that is where buying power is focused. Roughly this means they buy food in bulk and hold it to be released as they need it. All of this takes time. So when fruit is chosen by a buyer the priority is not about what will give the best taste, but rather how well will it store and survive the rigours of bulk handling. This is not to say all food bought from a supermarket is tasteless, but if it does taste as it should, well I think it's by more luck than judgment. I still find it odd that we are presented with options like "tomatoes: grown for flavour". So what are the rest grown for - playing over-sized marbles? Mind you they can have about as much flavour as a glass ball sometimes.Sadly, there is chain of events that happens every time supermarkets discover some new vegetable that they latch onto because restaurants and TV chefs have been using them. Normally it's to do with the actual flavor of the thing. The supermarkets catch on and get the growers they work with to produce a supermarket version, which roughly translates: make it cheaper, grow it faster, produce more. So the thing that got everybody talking is bred out under the banner of economics of scale, leaving us with yet another bland tasteless supermarket version. This principle applies to fruit and veg, but also cheese, meat and, to some extent, fish being put into those little polystyrene cling filmed gas flushed boxes. These have a great shelf life but unfortunately there is probably us much flavor in the polystyrene as the poor mistreated fish.When The River Cafe did there first TV series Ruthie Rogers (just think food TV before Jamie, he was just another line cook in The River Cafe kitchen waiting to be discovered) demonstrated the simplicity of a dish of tomatoes, mozzarella and basil with a little olive oil, saying anyone could replicate this wonderful simple summer stalwart of the Italian kitchen with all the ingredients available from any supermarket. At the time I was using the same green grocer; they only accepted tomatoes grown in Sicily, mozzarella was flown in from Rome and they would only use Genovese basil. Believe me you couldn't buy the olive oil they were using at Harrods Food Hall, let alone your local Tesco, so to say this dish was easily replicated using any supermarket fare, well it just isn't fair. Yes, you could make it, but it would only taste about one-tenth of the flavour achieved by the River Café original.

Keswick Codlin apples, which pre-date the classic Victorian Bramley apple by 100 years, first found growing on a rubbish dump outside Gleaston Castle in Ulverston in 1790's

So what's the alternative for our weekly sustenance shop?

Street markets, open air markets (some times referred to as farmers markets), a market of some sort. To suggest that anyone is going to turn away entirely from supermarkets for food purchasing would be pushing it a bit, but using markets as your main source for food, I think, will give a better result than shopping at any supermarket. It will help you to build up more understanding of raw materials, being able to look a person in the face who grew, made or bred what you are about to buy can really help. Ask questions if you are not sure about something. Sure you might not be talking to the farmer, but most traders now have a good idea of their product. If they give you that look that sale assistants give you in large multiple DIY stores whenever you ask anything more technical than 'where's the till', then try someone else.One of the main problems for us now is that over the years we've lost the ability to look a loaf of bread in the eye and decide for ourselves if it's good, bad or indifferent. Sadly, as a nation, we have become pretty much food illiterate. This skill used to be passed down from 'mother to daughter', but over the years, for lots of reasons it's just broken down. I think this is why supermarkets have become so dominant; instead of trusting our own judgment about food we've put our trust in them, we believe the PR. So if a supermarket is stocking something, we think it must be basically OK and wholesomely produced, otherwise they wouldn't have it on the shelves. Unfortunately that trust, in my view, can be somewhat misguided. I'll give you an example of how this lack of food knowledge is damaging our ability to make proper informed choices.Our house is made up of myself and my wife, having both made our livings from cooking in one form or another for most of our adult lives. Fast forward to Christmas time. Our run up to the big day has always consisted of roasting one heck of a lot of poultry and neither of us can face the ubiquitous roast bird on Christmas Day, whether the rarest of slow grown turkey's, goose or any other fowl you care to name. The smell of a roasting bird of any persuasion will simply make my stomach go queasy. So every year in our house a couple of lobsters lose their lives on Christmas morning, accompanied by a couple of dozen oysters. We like them grilled so someone has to do the kill - there is no gentle water bath for these two crustacions. Add lemon and chilli butter, some waxy Cyprus potatoes, butter again and a few chives; as far as we are concerned it's the nearest thing to bliss we will ever experience on earth. One year I had the lobsters on order from our commercial supplier (always try to get Scotch which in my view are the best in the world; unfortunately the French and Spanish think that to, so most of them get shipped to are Gallic cousins, leaving very few for home consumption).

Apple pie made with Codlin apples

In the year in question, I decided I go to Borough Market for the oysters. We always buy rock oysters, maybe because they have more of the sea in them. Anyway I went to see the fish shop were I'd chosen to buy them from early morning, about 7.30, wanting to miss the last minute rush which on Christmas Eve tends to kick of about 8.30. It was just me, the fish man and a young couple hanging around the entrance looking cold and confused, it was freezing. When I ordered my rock oysters the fish man said;"Look at these natives, I watched them pulled out of the water this morning. They cost a bit more but they'll be worth it, as fresh as you can get and have not been out of the water more than three hours."I knew this guy and his fish was always good; not cheap but well chosen and great quality, so I bought the natives. While all this exchange was happening the young couple were listening intently, looking really upset and confused. I caught some of their conversation while my oysters were being boxed; they couldn't decide if this was some sort of con going down. Was the fish man telling the truth or was he just spinning a yarn to sell the more expensive option? In the end they scurried away not buying anything, with no way of telling if the oysters were any good, and not willing in this case to trust the expert. Did they eventually turn up at a superstore somewhere to buy some nice safe plastic wrapped alternative, who knows?

Tomatoes at Turnips in Borough Market

Whether they were the best oysters or not is a bit obscure; they are not what you would pick up for a quick dinner on the way home. But if you used the same scenario in Paris I don't think it would have ended with the same result.So markets can help you understand the food you buy a lot more. It takes time, but when you talk to an enthusiastic expert in their field it's great to hear what, at the drop of a hat, they are typically more than happy to give in knowledge. And certainly with food there is always something new to learn about.Last week I bought some cooking apples that are not grown commercially anymore. The man selling them was the farmer; he described them as an early crop cooker and had been picked in the first week in August. I brought them home and made them into pie, served up with some organic, raw, untreated double cream. You don't need a couple of Michelin stars to make a great pudding...just some great apples will do.