Remember artisans? Those soulful-looking men
dedicated to handcrafting exquisite items like graceful spiral staircases, ornate
wrought-iron gates, handsome stone arches, spectral stained glass windows, or
elegant Windsor chairs. Often bearded, invariably quiet and still to the point
of gruffness, they wore manly leather aprons as they labored in their forges
and workshops. There they would patiently pound red-hot iron into shape on
anvils or painstakingly turn chair legs on a lathe, a sheen of sweat on their
taught biceps, proud in the knowledge that what they made would last forever
and be lovingly bequeathed from one generation to the next.
And this is the point: artisans make objects to
last. They don’t make ephemeral fripperies. Like bread, chocolate, beer, cheese,
olive oil, or coffee.
This is why it is so deeply irritating that the effete
gourmet food world has decided that “artisanal” is the new adjective of choice
for their over-priced, highly perishable products. OK, so you baked a loaf of
bread by hand, as opposed to mass-producing it in an industrial-scale machine.
But if that’s what makes bread “artisanal”, then the boiled chicken breast dish
interminably served up my dear departed mother was also “artisanal”. Perhaps if
we kids had called it “artisanal boiled chicken with a vrot-carrot jus” we might have enjoyed it more.
Which brings us to the insufferable “farmers’
markets” that have become so popular in some of our leafy suburbs. Artisanal
food is everywhere, but its natural habitat, where it congregates and breeds
like mutant bacteria, is these
pretentious events in centres of affluence like Sandton, Constantia and Knysna.
One Sunday, much against my better judgment, I agreed out of a sense of marital
duty to go to such a gathering. The first obstacle, of course, was the hordes
of free-range children giving vent to their Waldorfian urge to play, run,
scream and cannon hysterically into the
arthritic legs of grumpy grown-ups. Survive these little darlings and you are
confronted with the inanity of new age dreamcatchers, the Tarot card reader in
the gypsy skirt, and the Reiki practitioner who is perpetually gazing at some
deep truth about 3m behind your head.
I bravely
battled on, hoping to find something to eat, only to be confronted by the true
horror of these markets – stall upon stall of artisanal foods. Wild-harvested
quinoa. Single origin coffee beans that have been chewed by Indonesian rodents.
Feta made with Fairtrade buffalo milk. Even what I took from a distance to be a nice display of honest boerewors
turned out on closer inspection to be “artisanal charcuterie”.
The veggies were no better. All organic, and mostly
biodynamic – the seeds were planted at exactly the right hour of the right day at
the right point of the lunar cycle, strange incantations were muttered over
them, and they were dosed with potions made in the horns of virgin cattle. They
were grown next to their ideal companions and serenaded with piped Beethoven
before being plucked by custodians who first sought absolution from the spirit
of the universe for taking a vegetable life.
The result is a delicate, translucent lettuce leaf
so rarefied that it seems like a crime to subject it to the indignity of
passing through one’s digestive tract.
I know that being waterboarded by heartless CIA
agents in Guantanamo must be truly awful, but it can’t possibly be as bad as
enduring one of these infuriatingly precious markets. Fortunately, ordinary markets
still exist, where artisanal foods are banned. Well, maybe not formally banned,
but made to feel very unwelcome. Markets where people go to buy stuff they will
actually eat. Who cares if the cabbage is genetically modified and been forced
to grow at the wrong time of day? At least you can boil it to death and gobble it
down without feeling guilty.
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