Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
29
Let’s take tomatoes. If you want to make tomato sauce, you need pulpy, soft, ripe tomatoes,
but if you want to make a tomato salad you need greenish, harder ones. How can I know if I
don’t touch them? Oranges and lemons are the same. If you buy a soft lemon, the next day
you throw it in the bin’.
At the market, a direct sensory relation with food is sought and more and more
customers worry that they will no longer be able to touch their food before buying it if market
vendors are forced to adopt and follow the new hygiene procedures introduced by the
municipality. Vendors, on the other hand, are ambivalent towards hygiene regulations,
especially when customers handle produce that are easy to perish. I quote again from my
field-notes:
‘A man, having approached Enrico’s stall, started fingering kaki fruits
(persimmons) to see whether they were ripe enough. “I would bite one if I were in
your shoes. You squeeze them so much that if you do not buy them, I’m going to
throw them away!” argued Enrico. The man answered in a very resolute tone
saying, “This is a market, right? Am I in the wrong place by any chance?” Enrico,
red in the face from anger, replies, “Yes, but this is not a self-service. You wait
for me to finish, then you will be served”. “I am not here to waste my money!”,
the man says, and adds, “Why should I come to the market if I cannot even touch
the produce?”. The exchange ends with the customer walking away.’
According to the vendors, the challenge is to be able to provide a ‘modern’ service
without losing the directness of the market and without interfering too much with the
experiential relationship to food. Enrico is alert to this situation and worries about this
conflict. ‘This’, he says, ‘is one of the reasons why this market is so different from a
supermarket. You don’t need to wear a plastic glove to touch a peach. I know it is not very
hygienic, because your hands can be dirty and I don’t want to buy the fruit you have
touched . . .’ According to La Pescheria’s customers, a plastic wrap imposes a barrier between
the senses and food. If supermarket-like packaging were to be introduced at the market, it
would hinder this experience. Pre-wrapping is in fact almost totally absent from the market.
As Mrs La Rosa states clearly, ‘I like to come to the market because I can be close to what I
buy. I can touch and smell before buying. I can feel what is good, what is ripe enough. I prefer
this direct relationship with the produce. Much better than everything being wrapped in
plastic.’ Pre-wrapping would also impose a distance between the consumer and the products.
As De Certeau (1984: 75) highlights, ‘standardization, pre-wrapping, all the modern
procedures in food preparation worry people’, who doubt the quality of the products. There
are constant suspicions that by imposing cleanliness and banishing dirt modern procedures
introduce a new order. The order that is imposed on the market practice is indeed a new one,
driven by different ideas of safety, control and purity. New regulations about hygiene
introduce a dissonance in the pre-existent ordered system, which explains why any change in
this matter was a major concern among vendors and buyers at La Pescheria.
Dirt avoidance is a process of tidying up by ensuring that the order in external
physical events conforms to the structure of ideas. Rules on pollution impose order on
