Unchained Melody: An ode to Newtown Market

By Melody Thomas

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With the cost of food soaring, and more families struggling to put good, fresh kai on the table, Melody Thomas puts forward a case for buying direct from the growers at your local vegetable market. If you can handle it.

Every Saturday, unless I’m away or unwell, you’ll find me at Newtown Fruit and Vegetable Market. Me and my beat-up purple trolley, half collapsed and teetering on a dodgy wheel, doing a careful assessment from the periphery before diving into the throng.

I imagine this is some people’s idea of hell: strangers, friends, long-forgotten one-night stands and politicians pushing for a vote, all crushed into the Newtown School courts, hustling for the week’s best deal. The humanity! The exposure to the elements! The overwhelming array of produce! The Newtown Fruit and Vegetable Market is a timesucking vortex packed with distractions, blocked aisles and blatant disrespect for the laws of queueing, and I can’t get enough of it.

When I was a student, the waterfront markets in town were my local. After we’d bought our tomatoes and potatoes, we’d amble over to the covered section and do the rounds, sampling goat’s cheese, preserved meats and olives, never once purchasing a thing. Over the years I stopped going, opting for the convenience of the supermarket, with its chilly aisles and too-bright lights.

And then I had children. Suddenly, the idea of taking longer away from the house held some appeal. Plus fresh food seemed to be getting more expensive;  and this was a couple of years ago, when $5 for a cauliflower seemed too much. Boy was I in for a surprise!

“Perhaps…” I suggested to my husband “… I should return to the market?” Far too trusting and completely oblivious to my skiving motives, he agreed.

And so began my love affair with Newtown Market.

O Newtown Market! With your $2 coriander and Chinese doughnuts!

O Newtown Market! Where you can leave your trolley and pretty much never be robbed!

O Newtown Market! With your incredible playground! So parents can shop without children! And children can play without parents!!!

At Newtown Market, I have learned to look for bunches of grandmothers, gathered around a single crate. Over time, they’ve taught me their ways: pointing out the creamy yellow field spot on a watermelon; directing me to press gently on the ‘button’ on the avocado; discreetly slipping a mandarin segment under the tongue and giving a thumbs-up for sweetness. I’ve learned that the best citrus and avocados come from the Gisborne guys with the free-range eggs, that the stall nearest the playground has the freshest, leafiest greens and herbs, and that it’s impossible to be grumpy about rain or queues when faced with the unfalteringly cheery vendor by the hospital gate (l love you, vendor).

Choosing the market over the supermarket comes with many advantages, but there are also risks. You will inevitably buy fruit that turns overripe the moment you get it to your car. You’ll think you’ve found a bargain, only to find that same thing cheaper, looking fresher, at a different stall. You will find so many great deals – on spinach, spring onions, coriander, apples – that you will never again buy these things happily from the supermarket, at two or three times the price.

And of course the market operates in its own time zone, which must be respected. Try to hurry and you’ll inevitably find yourself in line behind a bulk-buying restaurant owner, or someone who’s doing all their shopping at the one stall (amateur!) One time the then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern showed up, on her birthday! Are you telling me you could have hurried off, skipping the very New Zealand-opportunity to bellow happy birthday to the PM? Doubtful. 

Plus half your friends are here. You can’t go by without saying hello! There’s Stan by the tofu stand, buying fishcakes for the whānau. Grayson and little Billie with their arms full of greens. Amber who runs a taco truck and always has the intel on top produce (jazz apples for the win!) You haven’t lived till you’ve tried to catch up with a friend next to the duelling buskers, who could have set up at opposite sides of the market but somehow, inexplicably, choose to play very different songs at max volume side by side.

Recently, something terrible happened. My husband suggested we get a vegetable box subscription. Sure, he allowed, they’re more expensive, but if you account for the time and petrol saved, maybe the difference wouldn’t be too much?

It’s sound reasoning, but it doesn’t take into account one thing: my happiness.

Without the Newtown Market on Saturdays, I’d have to, what, clean!? Play with the children?! (Mostly joking). What about that feeling I get afterwards, when the fruit bowls are overflowing with colour and scent, like all is OK because the family has been provided for (a feeling so many people are currently missing out on, even though it should be a human right – especially when it comes to children and our elderly).

So, on Saturdays – almost without fail – you will still find me at the Newtown Fruit and Vegetable Market. I will still be bopping around with my sweet market playlist on my headphones, smiling and chatting with friends. I’ll still tail the grandmas to the mandarins, chat with the Gisborne orange boy about our matching Bolivian sweaters. And when I’m done, I’ll make my way up to the playground, and collect my children from where I have left them.

It’s only fair.