A market at five in the morning

The first lorry backs into Fenwick Yard at a quarter past three, and by the time I arrive, a little before five, the market has already made most of its decisions. The cauliflowers have a price. The strawberries, the last of them, from glasshouses two counties away, have been looked at, sniffed, argued over and sold. What remains is the long middle of the morning, when the buyers for cafés and corner shops and school kitchens come in with their lists, and the traders who have been awake since midnight start to sound tired in a particular way: patient, a little theatrical, not yet ready to discount.

I had asked to spend a morning here because I wanted to see the moment a harvest becomes a menu. Most of what I write about happens on farms, where the questions are about weather and soil and debt. But between the field and the plate there is a room, a large, cold, strip-lit room, where a few dozen people decide what a city of four hundred thousand will be offered to eat this week. Nobody elects them. Most people have never heard of them. They work in fleeces and fingerless gloves and they know the price of a crate of leeks to the cent.

The language of the floor

Sol Marchetti has stood at the same pitch for twenty-six years. His father stood there before him, selling mostly potatoes, back when the market was across the river and the porters still used hand barrows. Sol sells everything now: roots, brassicas, salad, a little fruit. He does not sit down. When I ask him what time he started, he looks at me as though I have asked what year he was born.

“Half one,” he says. “Same as always. The ones who come at six think they're early.”

The floor has its own vocabulary, and I spent the first hour mostly listening to it. A pallet is not a quantity but a negotiation. Short means scarce, and scarce means the price is about to move. Seconds are the misshapen, the scuffed, the slightly too small: perfectly good food that a supermarket specification would refuse and that the market sells, quietly, to the people who know to ask.¹ When a buyer says a box of courgettes is “tired”, she is not really describing the courgettes.

Most of the money in the room, Sol explains, moves before dawn and moves on trust. Restaurant buyers ring their orders through at night; the larger greengrocers send a runner with a list and settle at the end of the month. Very little changes hands in cash any more, but very little is written down either. “If I lie to you about a box of tomatoes,” he says, “you remember for ten years.”

“If I lie to you about a box of tomatoes, you remember for ten years.”

Who decides the price

It is tempting to imagine a market as a machine: supply in one end, demand in the other, a price emerging in between. Standing in Fenwick Yard, it looks more like a conversation between people who have known each other for a very long time and do not entirely trust one another. Prices are set first thing by a handful of the bigger traders, adjusted by rumour (someone has heard the glasshouse tomatoes are late, someone has seen a lorry of lettuce turned away at the port) and then quietly broken, all morning long, by everyone else.

Agnieszka Rowe buys for eleven school kitchens across the north of the city. She has a budget per meal that has not changed in three years, which means that every year she can buy a little less. She walks the floor twice: once to look and once to buy. On the first pass she says almost nothing. On the second, she knows exactly who has too many carrots.

“Carrots are my friend,” she tells me. “Carrots and cabbage. They keep, children will eat them if you roast them, and in October everybody has too many.” The menus her kitchens serve in a given week are written, more or less, by whatever is short and whatever is not. The kitchen managers have learned to keep two versions of Thursday's soup.²

By half past six the light outside has gone from black to a kind of wet grey, and the floor changes again. The big buyers have gone. The people who arrive now are smaller and later: a man with a van who supplies three cafés, a couple who run a vegetable box scheme and come to top up what their own farm can't grow, a chef in clogs who buys one crate of chard and then stands talking to Sol for twenty minutes about his daughter's wedding.

This is the part of the morning the traders like best, I think. The pressure is off. Prices soften. Things get thrown in: a bunch of parsley, a box of slightly bruised pears, “for the kids”. Somebody brings a tray of tea from the café by the gate, and for a quarter of an hour the market feels less like an exchange and more like a village that happens to be made of pallets.

What gets left

At the end of the morning there is always something left. On the day I visited it was mostly lettuce, because a warm week had brought three growers' crops in at once, and a few dozen boxes of plums that had arrived soft. Some of it will go back into the cold store and be sold tomorrow at a lower price. Some will go to a food bank that sends a van at eight. Some, inevitably, will go in the skip behind the loading bay, and Sol does not like to talk about that.

“You can't sell weather,” he says eventually. “You get a good week, everybody's got lettuce. You get a bad week, nobody has. Either way the people at the end of it think we're robbing them.”

I left a little after eight, with a bag of seconds I had insisted on paying for and a much clearer sense of what I don't know. Next week I'll follow one of those crates of lettuce back to the farm it came from, and forward to the fridge where it ends up. I want to know how many hands it passes through, and what each of them is paid.³