A truck rolls slowly down the street. The driver is on a loudspeaker blasting: "Fresh tomatoes--one kilo for one lira." The message ricochets off the tall walls created in the corridor of apartment buildings lining Mithat Paşa Street. His son stands in the bed of the truck, yelling a similar message at a lower volume.
The truck--laden with tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers--stops midway between the two small grocery stores in front of my flat. The driver gets out, stands in the street and hollers about his tomatoes again.
Women in the flat directly above the truck start to notice. A couple poke their heads out of windows and lean off of balconies, craning their necks to see the produce. One on the sixth floor confirms the price with the driver and disappears into her flat, only to emerge a few moments later on the street to buy.
A head appears in a second floor window; her friend from the sixth floor buys her tomatoes for her.
The driver, as he looks around at the tall flats and balconies, notices me peering down at him. He hollers about tomatoes at me, but I sink back in my chair, out of his line of sight. Thankfully I didn't have my camera out right then when he looked at me. What a yobancı...
No one else comes to buy and he climbs back into the cab, his son braces himself against the truck walls and they continue their crawl down Mithat Paşa.
This kind of thing happens regularly in İzmir. Farmers with local, fresh produce park their truck--often in the street--and set up temporary shop. I can't imagine that local manavs (green grocers) are happy about this, but what can they do?!
Maybe I never lived in a big-enough city in the States, but this approach to food is entirely new to me. I think that there would be all sorts of red tape stopping my farmer and his son from selling their veggies on the street: no business permit; health and cleanliness standards that someone in a white coat would be willing to quibble about; disturbing the peace with all that hollering.
Then there's the moving traffic violation of his son enjoying the morning sun in the back of the truck... Not to mention the crime of selling tomatoes for so absurdly cheap: At today's exchange with the American dollar, that's 32 cents a pound for fresh, farm-picked tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes. Beat that Monsanto.
2 comments:
In Granada, Nicaragua, there was this truck with huge speakers in the bed facing backwards that cruised around town and blasted a radio station non-stop. You could hear these idiots coming blocks away. One afternoon this truck got stopped in traffic right below our hotel room window, and it tortured us for about five minutes before moving on. Ugh, if ever there was a truck that disturbed the peace, it was it.
While I've never experienced the loud speaker approach to selling produce, I have seen people set up spontaneous "stands"(in Idaho) selling produce. Usually the "stand" consists of the back of a pick up truck and a sandwich board sign, or just a piece of cardboard. It's usually fruit from other states -- oranges from California, grapefruits from Texas, peaches from ... somewhere :) But of course it's never cheap.
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