Spotting the Good Apples at Britain’s Largest Fruit and Veg Market

It's 3 AM on a Tuesday morning and I'm stood in New Covent Garden Market eyeing up a box of Kentish cobnuts. Stood next to me is my unfortunate babysitter for the evening, Helen Evans, the market's director of business.

"How do you use them?" I ask, beady-eyed, like I'm inspecting some kind of alien object.

She looks at me, deadpan. "Like a nut."

Thankfully, she shifts focus, lifting up a punnet of strawberries to my snoz and telling me to sniff. A child-like smile creeps across my face.

"Yeah," she says, "It smells like a strawberry."

Unlike my nut faux pas, this isn't quite as obvious as it sounds. Strawberries don't smell like strawberries. The true strawberry is sweet and musky haloed with an aroma that ensnares the nostrils like pixie dust. It's a scent that belongs to the earth. Sniff a generic strawberry in a generic supermarket, however, and you might as well smell brick.

And this is no Tesco Metro.

New Covent Garden Market is the UK's largest fruit and vegetable wholesale market. It supplies 40 percent of the fresh produce eaten outside of the home in London, from cafes to schools to Le Gavroche. Even the grocers of London Zoo shop here, stocking up on cabbages and coconuts for the animals (male sloths fucking hate mushrooms, apparently).

At 3 AM, we've missed most of the action. The masses usually arrive at the Market at around midnight, but there's still a buzz about the place. As we make our way down Buyers' Walk—the stretch of concrete walkway lined with boxes of produce known as the "Flash" because it shows off what each wholesaler has ready to be shipped—we're greeted with a "Morning" by everyone that passes, pulling crates of veg behind them or zipping off to grab a bacon butty from the market's all-night caff.

As we go, passing opal plums, flat and round peaches, British blueberries, and Spanish black figs, Evans explains that there are three important factors for buyers: colour, size, and provenance. In that order.

"Take red basil. There's no reason people eat it, they just like the colour for garnish or whatever," she says as we stop beside a box of pineapples. "And as for size, queen pineapples are perfect for serving a sorbet in."

If the colours of New Covent Garden Market are kaleidoscopic, then the knowledge of its workforce is unreal. In amongst the tips you'd find in the What to have in your pantry chapter of any old cookbook (i.e. bananas give off a gas that ripens other fruit and veg, so never store them in the fruit bowl), I'm given titbits of information from each seller that feed an appreciation of the produce on show and explain the inner machinations of the market.

I have my mind blown on several occasions: Did you know, for instance, that carrots aren't naturally orange? It was 17th century Dutch growers that cultivated the variety as a tribute to William of Orange and although some dispute this claim as apocryphal, there's no denying that pre-1600 carrots were yellow, white, or purple.

Another carrot fact: the French produce a certain type of carrot—les carottes des sables—which is grown in sand. They're straighter because they don't have to work as hard to break through heavy soil.

The list goes on: Ireland used to monopolise the European mushroom market, now it's Poland. If you melt a hunk of wax on to the stem of a gourd, it won't dry out, and chervil root tastes like coconut.

There's something old fashioned about New Covent Garden Market and it's not just The Corrs playing in the background on Magic FM. It feels authentic. If the staff aren't always friendly, they're certainly not phoney.

Every conversation isn't a pitch to a pound sign with eyes. People come here for the produce and it's treated as the star of the show. It's not imprisoned behind a sheet of plastic, it's lain bare to be fondled, tasted, and tried.

Sure, sometimes the sellers are shipping out apples and pears by the tonne and it literally pays to be accommodating, but there's something to be said for a positive relationship between buyer and seller.

Jim Hounsell has been at the market for nearly 50 years. He started in the 70s, working alongside his dad and granddad when he was just a boy. He's now the market manager of The French Garden. He tells me the "whole industry changed completely" because of the supermarkets.

"Wholesaler markets used to be in charge. The farmers sent their stuff here and all the green grocers bought their stuff from here. Now, the supermarkets have taken the trade," he says. "Sainsbury's used to buy from the old market by the lorry-load—a lorry-load of melons say. Once they found out where the market got the melons from, they bypassed the market. And then they went to the co-ops in Spain or wherever and bought the farm. Now they pick them, pack them, and ship them. They have there own supply chain."

As the retail buyers fled, money flooded out of the market and wholesalers started to diversify, building bridges with new farmers and producers and selling any thing that they could get their mitts on. As a result, the market became a hotbed of competition, with producers undercutting one another to ship their stock.

Pre-supermarkets, Hounsell says it wasn't like this. Wholesalers specialised in one type of produce and would recommend other stalls to buyers if they didn't have what they wanted. Things were more synergistic.

"It's too competitive now," he says. "It's driving the price down. Yes, that might be good for the buyer but it's not for the seller. And if the sellers realised that it's a good idea to have exclusivity, prices would stay up and we'd keep the market alive."

Since the Covent Garden Market Act of 1961, the government's Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food (MAFF) has owned the Market, although it plans to step away once the latest renovation is completed in 2020. The MAFF has presided over the Market, but has it protected it?

A 2001 parliamentary report on the market concluded that "it is clear that only the Government has the necessary resources and authority to address the issue [of securing the market's future], and we urge it to do so."

Yet at no point has the government stepped in to stop the monopolisation of the supermarkets.

In France on the other hand, Hounsell says the government protected the wholesalers markets and made the industry a level playing field.

"They've still got the same system that we used to have," he tells me. "The supermarkets buy from the wholesalers. You upset the French, they just go on strike."

Strikes or not, places like New Covent Garden Market should be protected. Not least because they prove that just because you're selling something, it doesn't mean that you can't celebrate it too.