Elitist Markets and Everyone Else

Markets are facinating places. Around the world, one goes out of their way to visit the local markets, to get a feel for the richness they bring, the vibrant colours, the loud noises, the bartering, the bargaining.

Open Air Market, India,
Photograph by William Albert Allard, National Geographic

What I wonder is what people think when they visit our markets. What have cities like Toronto done to the fundamental beauty that is a market. Sure, there's the Saint Lawrence market, a pretty nice place for some quite expensive meat, cheese or olives...

Animals for sale at the Jatinegara market in Jakarta, Indonesia,
Photograph by Mark Leong, National Geographic

But are markets here only for special occasions? Do they not create links between farmers and eaters? Create bridges between rural and urban? How can we make them more affordable? More accessible? Is it possible that the food bank is the new farmers market? What does this tell us about us? What does this tell us about poverty, about ever-growing income disparities?

Fish Vendor Stalls
Photograph by James L. Stanfield, National Geographic

These thoughts are spurred from numerous frustrating visits to the expensive markets in my neighbourhood, that have lovely things that are not worth the price. It also comes from an article I read on the Atlantic blog, called "How $8-a-Dozen Eggs Threaten Real Food Reforms" (see it here) by Jane Black. This then triggered a response on Mother Jones called "The Deal With $8 Eggs" (see it here) by Tom Philpott.

Marrakech Market at Night
Photograph by Ben Carron, National Geographic

Troubled by the thought that the only way to get good food is to pay more, Philbott suggests making agriculture pay the cost of its own devastative practices. He says:

But if you made the giant hog factories deal properly with the vast amount of toxic waste they produce, the price difference reverses. In other words, a Walmart value-pack of pork chops would cost significantly more per pound than the pasture-raised ones that give you sticker shock at the farmers market.

And untreated toxic waste is only one so-called externality, or unpaid cost, of factory hog farming. Another major one is the rising menace of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, which flourish when you stuff hogs together by the thousands and feed them daily "subtherapeutic" antibiotic doses. Pew reckons that the antibiotic resistance problem adds between $16.6 billion to $26 billion in extra costs to the nation’s annual health care bill. How much more would those Walmart pork chops be if the hog industry had to pay its share of that bill?