Shopping in Pemba

This morning involved looking around the key shops and main market in Pemba. All supplies that can't be sourced from Guludo Village can be found in Pemba. Large supermarkets sell most dry store stapes as well as imported products. Soy sauce and pastas are available but they cost.

In fact, Pamba is an expensive. At the open air market fruit and veg was much more costly than expected. The current exchange rate of meticais to sterling sits at forty to the pound.

Water melon is about £1 a kilo, onions are£1.75/kg and cucumbers at £1.5/kg. Tomatoes have apparently just shot up to 100mt/kg, weighing in a whopping £2.5o/kg. The honey you can see in the 25cl water bottles costs 310mt, about £7.75. apparently it's like rocking horse shit - rare as hell, but much tastier.

Fortunately village prices are much cheaper. Tomatoes are half the price at 50mt/kg and a dozen eggs are 40mt compared with about 110mt in Pemba.

Off to the lodge at 9am tomorrow with two guests and Cassiano who will be driving...

New Covent Garden Market

Back in the day my old Grandad ran a modest apple farm out in the Essex countryside. After each harvest the fruit, picked by the traveling community, was taken to London and sold at the original Covent garden market. He was one of a tonne of tiny producers who sold their yield at Covent Garden. These days New Covent Garden market sit on a purpous built 50 acre site on Nine Elms Lane. I went down there at the crack of dawn to check it out.


Above you can see the 'buyers walk' where one can stroll down and see all the of the fruit an veg on offer.

yellow beets

salsify, perfect zuccini tondo, squashes and girolles

baby pineapples

a huge variety of micro herbs, lost of which i'd never heard of

The 'Shroom Room'

enormous & lush kaffir leaves

courgette flowers (still available?)

dunno

a mixed box of french toms

fresh dates - this was a first for me, they are delicous and so much bater than the claggy box of dried 'eat me's' that my Mum insists on buying for Chrimbo

Romanesco broccoli, or Roman cauliflower

So much of this produce gets sold directly to restaurants and is never seen by the general public in its raw state. Why? I want to buy a crazy box of mixed tomatoes, enormous yellow beets or exotic mushrooms by the handful much more easily than I can now. I know certain grocers that stock some of this stuff but why don't we see more on the street? With increased interest in sourcing, sustainability, organics, healthy living and what we eat in general lets call for a democratisation of funky veg. More startlingly good fruit and veg for all! We want it and we want it now.

www.newcoventgardenmarket.com
Address: New Covent Garden Market, London, SW8 5BH