upmarket

One of the advantages of living in an affluent area is the high quality of food one can purchase effortlessly. In London, the number of Waitrose stores, an upmarket grocer, correlates roughly with the wealth of an area. Specialty shops add international delicacies to the mix. At least once a week, a farmers' market brings fresh produce from just outside London.

I don't live in an affluent area. North End Road is grubby and cheap, lined with pound stores, off-licenses, betting shops and bingo halls, though curiously few kebab houses. Six days a week, a market sprawls from the infamous double roundabout at Lillie Road down to St. John's church, with traders pitching their booths, vans and tables every morning on the eastern side of the road.

There's a cheese man who's French, an egg lady, two olive vendors and a felafel frier, but most of the space is taken up by various fruit and veg businesses. It's good to go out there on a Saturday morning before the crowds show up, before nine in other words, and scoop up some vitamins. At prices that can't be beat, universally a pound a bowl, I get apples, mangos, kaki fruit and, if they're in season, figs, cherries or grapefruit.

The problem is that the produce doesn't always meet the expectations raised by the presentation, acres of red, yellow and green shining in the morning sun. The veggies are often limp, the cherries quick to rot. Peaches are best avoided because they won't last beyond breakfast. I imagine the traders' business model hinging on getting to New Spitalfields Market right before closing and scooping up for bargain prices what other retailers shun. The result is that every purchase should best be consumed the same day.

When I got up one morning after coming back from Marseille a few weeks ago, I noticed a strange smell in my living room. Should air out the room, I figured, and went to the window. That's when I saw the source of the smell. It didn't come from inside.

In front of my window was a tenant new to the market, his blue-and-white tarp half covering a table displaying styrofoam boxes full of fish. It was early in the morning and the market had hardly opened, but the fish already smelled. There were token piles of ice but the carcasses didn't look good. Glistening scales, crisp fins, vivid colors – all the signs of freshness had already been drained from the abused bodies. God knows when they had been dragged from the water and how they had got to the market.

At this point I was fairly confident that the fishmonger would quickly pack up shop. He probably got a load of fish for cheap and now sold them off for quick profit, notwithstanding possible danger to the consumers. When the first locals had died of food poisoning, he would have long moved on, I predicted. But three weeks later, the proprietor of the internet café downstairs keeps fumigating his shop with incense so thick it's hard to see the screens and cries into my shoulder whenever we meet. The fishmonger is still there and the noxious smell of old fish hovers heavily. But no one has fallen ill, and maybe what's on sale simply reflects the purses of the local residents.

At Marylebone farmers' market where I went this morning, the atmosphere couldn't be more different. On a small backstreet parking lot, hidden unless you know where to look, are a few dozen little stalls that visibly favor quality over quantity. Everything is organic or free-range and, what's more important, farm-fresh and crisp.

Telling from the little signs by nearly all poultry and game stalls, pheasant is currently in season. There were also fruits and vegetables as they should be, small flavorful apples, heirloom tomatoes, freshly baked cakes and breads and fish that looked as if they had just come in from a little swim this morning.

I had come for dairy products. England produces cheeses as good as they are underappreciated. A farmers' market is a good place to sample some. I ended up with a cheddar from Glastonbury and a Mozzarella from Somerset buffalo, but what I really wanted to buy was a bottle of raw milk.

Raw milk is a bit of a rarity, a bit like whale meat, its trade prohibited by law in many places. In the UK, grocery stores are banned from carrying it. Only farmers are allowed to sell untreated milk. When I found out about this a few months ago, I was first surprised that unpasteurized milk existed at all and then got curious about trying.

Unfortunately, the guy who usually sells milk at Marylebone wasn't around today. I'll probably repeat the journey into central London next week. How I wish I lived in a posher area with a good farmers' market nearer by, but then this post would only be half as long.