A modern economy has no need for street markets; the need they serve is cultural, not economic. The vast majority of market products are the same as elsewhere and sold at the same prices. The market is an enchanted world where stallholder talent combines with customer desire to make products appear different from what they are.
In the minds of most customers, shopping at the market means first and foremost laying in a supply of fruits and vegetables, natural rather than industrial products. You have to admit that the Carpentras market is smaller. Sometimes I go to Marseille; they have a bigger selection than in Avignon. Starting in May we do Carpentras, where we can get at least 20 percent of our potential salad needs, and little things.
We buy about 20 percent from rural markets and all the rest from the middlemen, the wholesalers, who get the merchandise externally. Despite the illusion they produce, the vast majority of market fruits and vegetables have therefore been grown almost industrially, using the most modern methods.
Clearly produce rotates more quickly at the market; fruits and vegetables do not lie around several days in the enclosed space and stale air of the store and they are not wrapped in plastic. In itself it is a myth of origin according to which, thanks to the market, this lettuce head has arrived as if by magic from the soil in which it was grown to the plate from which it is eaten.
Through his selling setup, the stallholder stages two competing representations of nature: its universal, generous fecundity, but also a more intimate image: the well-tended nook, the lovingly cultivated little garden behind the house. Most fruit and vegetable sellers in Carpentras, whether stallholders or not, choose the first representation and play above all on the abundance and diversity of the produce they sell. The impression of lush, prodigious nature is due to both the accumulation of foodstuffs and the way the stall is organized.
