09 Dec 2015 Jo’burg Market: Wholesome chaos
Jo’burg’s fresh produce market is a frenetically busy place; full of vibrant chaos and “no better antidote to the grumpiness of the national mood”, as this article portrays.
IT’S early on a Saturday morning and you can already see the waves of heat dancing off the tar. It’s going to be one of those grimly hot Jo’burg days, where even the litter is rigid with ennui, and no-one seems to walk as much as pull themselves on all fours through the cloying, greasy heat.
While verges bake, trees wither and the temperature heads for 35°C, I’m off to the Jo’burg Market, a cave of warehouses in the southern side of town.
There are bargains to be had and the simple, passed-over pleasures of seeing and touching natural abundance.
Situated in City Deep, the market contains eight halls — long, raised warehouses the length of container vessels. These halls are ventilated at the top and airy throughout. They are frenetically busy from about 5am to 11am from Monday to Saturday.
The best days to visit, say the marketing agents through whom the producers sell, are Tuesdays and Fridays, particularly if you are going in search of a bargain; though for those who work all week, Saturday isn’t a bad idea either. But one should get there early, when it’s still cool.
You gain access to the halls from street level by either taking the steps or darting up raised concrete ramps. Once on the floor, you enter the manic atmosphere, mainly caused by the way the fork-lift trucks move about.
Time was when fresh produce was transported the hall’s length on long conveyor belts, but the practice was discontinued some time ago. Now onions and potatoes, as well as boxes of tomatoes, are all stacked on pallets, and these are transported with a kind of devil-may-care abandon by the drivers of the fork-lift trucks.
There are between 100 and 120 pockets of potatoes per pallet, each pocket costing around R40. A long-haul freight truck contains maybe 40 pallets’ worth. Loads at between R150 000 and R200 000 come in from the Northern Province. Soon the vast commercial farms there will stop harvesting their crop, and the potato-producing area will shift. The spuds will come from farms around Gauteng and further south.
According to the old hands, the market used to be an altogether more ordered and shipshape place. There was a market master, for example. He used to walk around in a white coat and inspect the concessions, chat to the agents and check that everything was sparkling and scrubbed clean.
That was when SA had boards: the potato board, the banana board, the egg board. They were there, in part, to ameliorate the farmers’ risk. The story goes that if stock wasn’t moving, the board would intervene and dump the food to give the impression that the market was buying.
This doesn’t happen anymore, with market interventions taking different forms, this year’s potato and onion crop being a case in point. On the morning of my visit there is a glut of both, with prices spiralling downward. The drought isn’t good for potatoes. Too many of them are being harvested at the same time and this means prices are falling.
With production moving to the south will come new dynamics, and the farmers will presumably get an increase in price per pocket.
There is a further division in the potato trade. The market prefers white potatoes to yellow ones. This is because restaurants and fast-food chains believe that white ones make for better chips. This appears to be a purely cosmetic distinction, and not one based on texture or flavour. Customers just don’t like yellow chips with their burgers.
Contrast the rough ride of the humble potato with the altogether more frisky future of your average lettuce.
Lettuce loves water. And because there’s so little of it around, the lettuce crop is diminishing. Demand remains fairly constant, and so lettuce prices are rocketing.
Will tomatoes, olives and feta remain as the only ingredients in your average green salad? But salad might become a relative term in all but the most expensive restaurants, as the cucumber, the rocket and the radicchio all wither away.
A small proportion of produce at the market comes from elsewhere in Africa I’m informed — grapes from Egypt (as well as Israel) and beans and exotic greens from Kenya.
Unlike in the days of boards and dumping, not only does the market import selectively, it is also plugged into the buying trends of neighbouring countries.
I’m told that 15 trucks a week come from Mozambique, arriving empty and leaving full when they return home. There are less-monied punters, too. You don’t have to look very carefully to spot Venda bakkies with white tyres and masking tape looped over the steering wheel. Assorted skorokoros can be seen listing with huge bags of assorted vegetables and watermelons tightly stacked.
There are even solitary buyers, single women leaving with a pocket of potatoes balanced carefully on their head, a week’s worth of meals perhaps for a family that can afford nothing more.
Elsewhere in the market’s eight gigantic halls there seems to be no great evidence of our continuing drought since the late rains of November. There are boxes of neatly stacked limes, some grass green, some shading into lemon yellow; and punnets of cherries, sweet melons, watermelons, apples and early peaches. In a nearby hall are tens of bright green raffia bags stuffed with red and green chillies.
I buy a sack of firm, fresh garlic (about 80 cloves) for a R100 and four punnets of blood red, glistening cherries for R80.
If you are prepared to buy in bulk or in larger quantities than usual to split the load with family or friends, it makes good sense to venture south at least once a month….