At farmers' markets, we expect to see fruit bursting with juicy
sweetness and vegetables greener than a golf course. For Michèle de La
Pradelle these expectations are mostly the result of a show performed by
merchants and sustained by our propensity to see what we want to see
there. Hailed upon its release in France, the award-winning Market Day
in Provence lays bare the mechanisms of the contemporary outdoor market
by providing a definitive account of the centuries-old institution at
Carpentras, a city near Avignon in the south of France famous for its
quintessential public street market.
The renewal and celebration of the outdoor market culture in recent
years, argues de La Pradelle, artfully masks a fierce commitment to
modern-day free-market economics. Responding to consumer desire for an
experience that recalls a time before impersonal supermarket chains and
mass-produced products, buyers and sellers alike create an atmosphere
built on various fictions. Vendors at the market at Carpentras, for
example, oblige patrons by acting like lifelong acquaintances of those
whom they've only just met as they dispense free samples and lively,
witty banter. Likewise, going to the market to look for "freshness"
becomes a way for the consumer to signify the product's relation to
nature--a denial of the workaday reality of growing melons under plastic
sheets, then machine-sorting, crating, and transporting them.
Offering captivating descriptions of goods and the friendly and
occasionally piquant exchanges between buyers and sellers, Market Day
in Provence will be devoured by any reader with an interest in areas as
diverse as food, ethnography, globalization, modernity, and French
culture.
