White People and farmers’ markets
March 7, 2009
- My depressingly bourgeois Dutch cream potatoes.
This morning a friend and I went to the new Eveleigh farmers’ market at the Carriageworks, Redfern. Got a bit of nice veg, and a rather decent chorizo & egg brekky roll*. But we were both a bit freaked at realising once again how smug everyone looks at inner-city farmers’ markets – and even more deeply disheartening is how we look exactly like them. The ol’ black t-shirt & jeans on a slightly dishevelled middle-ager carrying a bloody eco-shopping bag of some kind. The only thing we didn’t have was kids in a gigantic black eco-stroller.
I stopped going to the otherwise fab Orange Grove Market partly because I’m too lazy to drive 20 minutes, and partly because of the claustrophobic crowds and the number of irritating lawyer types watching their anklebiters disappear into the crowd, and instead of going to fetch the kid, rather just stand and bellowinto one’s nearby ear, something like Hadrian! Come back to Daddy, Hadrian! Mummy’s taken Tango and Bodicea to their Urdu lesson, and I need you to try on this ironic t-shirt for toddlers that says ‘My First Recession’! It’s made of bamboo, Hadrian!
Oops. Sorry. Anyhoo the Eveleigh market is (so far) much less crowded then Orange Grove and when the sales people are actual farmers as opposed to six-foot tall young glamour yoga belles with oversized headscarves (do they recruit at modelling agencies or NIDA, do you reckon?) I do feel good about buying a nice bag of Dutch creams or beautiful-looking salad leaves that the man assured us had been washed ‘in rainwater’ (please), but which will last longer than a week cos so fresh.
However, it is too disenchanting to discover just exactly how pinpoint-accurate is that very clever book by Christian Lander – Stuff White People Like – and how futile it is to imagine that one is truly an individual. Sigh.
Must dash, have a food blog to write. Oh, god …..
* This, Christian Lander, must be get top billing as Takeaway Breakfast White People Like, don’t you think? Even more shamefully, the eggs are described on the stall’s sign not as ‘scrambled’ – but ‘confused’. How ironic we all are; doesn’t that just make you want to bite out your own veins. Trouble is, despite its mortifying irony and ‘original twist’ on the old standard, it was still bloody delicious.
How to shuck an oyster 
Ok, so this post had me laughing out loud and reading bits to my husband…We did much the same at the Footscray markets yesterday… except the chorizo and egg brekky roll was a rather odd, Malaysian banana fritter…
Well Simonne, I hate to break it to you but a Malaysian banana fritter is definitely NOT White People food. I am pretty sure ironic faux-Italian beats strange Malaysian on the WP desirability scale. For a start, where was the tongue-in-cheek title? And second, Asia is way too scary for White People. Italian much better.
(ok, i am getting way too caught up in this stuff, but do have a look at Christian Landers’ blog – it’s hilarious and it actually chilled me a few times. I’m on the management committee of Sydney PEN, for example, and one of the biggies on the list of Stuff White People Like is … political prisoners. Ouch.)
Yes, true that!
I have been to his blog, but it was a while ago; I must go back and check it out again. You do seem rather into it, my dear… but you know, what you’re doing with PEN can only be for the greater good, so you’re excused… 🙂
Caught midway between giggling and wanting that breakfast roll REALLY BADLY.
[…] People Like man himself, Christian Lander, is coming out for the festival. I first mentioned him here, in a post about farmer’s […]
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