Return to the mercado

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A fruit and vegetable stand in Colombia
A fruit and vegetable stand in Colombia

Call me cranky or neurotic, but I cannot understand why tomatoes need stickers. This sticky subject came upon me recently while I stepped out of the office to run some errands at one of the largest supermarket conglomerates in Bogotá. Thinking that it might be a good time to fill the fridge, I found myself thrown to the throngs of Saturday shoppers playing bumper carts in the aisles next to the Musli and cottage cheese.

After ticking off my list, I made my way to the eco-friendly section of the food park. Now, for as long as I have lived in this country, I have always enjoyed the vegetable and fruit sections the most, mainly because they are well stocked with Colombian produce. Then there is the fact that vegetables here actually look like vegetables and were picked by human hands, tossed into a wooden crate, transported across this country and have the scars and bruises to prove it. The imperfection of food is one of its most genuine qualities.

But we are becoming a demanding bunch with our perishables. More often than not, food is being packaged to look like design accessories rather than dietary necessities. It’s strangely ominous. Take the lettuce for example, each variety from the Romaine to the garden crisp was individually boxed in plastic and sold at a price of $2,800 pesos. Now, drawing on lessons learned from Economics 101, how much of this plastic is actually being passed on to the consumer, only to be discarded hours later as contaminating refuse?.

Plastic has become a plague, yet markets and food stores, knowing this, continue to bag our groceries in it. One million plastic bags are produced every minute in the world and much of it ends up in our parks, rivers, forests, entangling reefs and endangering the lives of dolphins and other sea creatures. On a recent trip to the Islas del Rosario, I had to comb a beach as little plastic bags, used to store drinking water, had washed ashore like jellyfish. Although canvas bags as an eco-solution are available in some established supermarkets across the city, pushing the green initiative by many corporations on how to conserve on plastic, seems still low on social responsibility agenda.

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Then the issue with tomatoes. Every single fire-engine red ‘chonto’ had a tiny sticker attached to it. Some sort of seal of approval from the official tomato branding division. Now, I know it’s not just the tomotaes, bananas and melons carry stickers too. But how much sticky tape is actually being printed just to reiterate the obvious, I ask. A tomato is a tomato, or isn’t it?

Business is within its right to win over customer loyalty and advertising/branding is usually the means by which companies reach an untapped market, especially if you are in one. Yet there is a branding which can be beneficial and one which isn’t.

One supermarket chain in the city introduced a Platinum card for carefully selected clients in which they offer discounts on certain items on specific days. Now if you are not in possession of this plastic you will be excluded from benefits. It seems to be some kind of Darwin-inspired marketing  where ‘exclusivity’ is branded through exclusion. Needless to say, I am preparing myself for the day when the Platinum cardholders get to go to the front of line.

In a time when no one is excluded by growing economic pressures and concerns, there seems to be a flurry of social branding out there that seems plucked right out of an eighties advertising manual. A decade when the world faced its last recession and which was characterized by selective ad campaigns.

While the need for status might be characteristic of living in a large metropolis, I find that the rest of the country has largely been spared by this. The public market in towns and villages throughout this country are still great unifiers, bringing farmers and merchants together, under the same corrugated roof, and where fruit and vegetables are sold not as a brand, but as something essential for people. And the fact that the tomatoes are bruised, makes them that much more appetizing. Going ‘green’ in this country has to be more than a slogan or a match for the word ‘gourmet’. It has to be a way of life we should strive to preserve.

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