We have a really excellent farmers market about every four to six weeks, these are totally different to the normal Sunday markets where a lot of rubbish / rejects are sold.
Lots of fresh fruit and veggies on sale at them for a reasonable price.
There is a seafood market / festival coming up this weekend where you get to taste seafood plus buy the product as well.
Bundaberg has a lot of Asian, European & Pacific Island shops selling a lot of great tasting stuff.
We have three Aldi stores, two Woolworth's, and two Coles and two IGA stores selling tasty stuff.
All fresh and flavoursome food, it just needs a "bit of imagination" to cook a nutritious meal with the ingredients available.
Isn't it interesting how many different types of market there are. Plus all of the different cuisines. I am in a rural area in the centre of England, 2 miles from a city centre with a couple of universities, 25 miles south of one of the contenders for Englands second city and 20 miles from what we think of as a world famous tourist centre the birthplace of playwright William Shakespeare. So we have a specialist shop somewhere for every nation you can think of. Here mainly Korean. Turkish 5 miles away etc etc. Back to markets. There are a couple of agricultural markets where lifestock, produce and butchery are sold and the quality of produce there is very high. Most of the towns hereabout have markets which sell everything bric a brac to electronics and everything in between. Usually the stalls take over a couple of shopping streets 2 or 3 days a week and the traders will work a couple of markets. Birmingham and Coventry have markets open most of the week and the storeholders have them as a permanent sales outlet. The overheads for running these market stores are quite significant especially for the most popular ones like a weekend market near Stratford. The standard of produce is good to very good. Then we have artisan traders who make stuff like our Berkswell cheese
https://www.finecheese.co.uk/berkswell.html?___SID=U, several small breweries and butchers. Excellent in a few products but not possible to do a weekly shop. Then there are the farms who have a farm shop (there are also the farm shops on land that might pass for a farm) which may or may not produce some of the products for sale. These sell much the same cheese and cooked meats as a high street deli and a lot more fresh produce than the average deli. They are good in some things like any low turnover shop
Then there are the farmers markets which around here sprang into being in protest at the low payments producers were receiving from the supermarket. I can only presume the farmers markets Chook has in Yorkshire are more like our agricultural markets. For the ones I have been to you may be lucky and find an excellent product but the odds are much better at one of the other sorts of market which are also the ones likely to undercut prices in the supermarkets. So in response to
@carbolysis op I would never suggest a farmers market. For people working traditional hours agricultural markets are impossible to get to and even I with all the convenience on my doorstep cannot be bothered to trapse around all of the options but if someone is prepared to say they really want to find somewhere they can get really good Turkish Olives for instance I could provide details for this area and others could do likewise. Hey presto we have a wealth of gastronomy information at our finger tips
