ft weekend
FOOD AND DRINK

The first lady of London's farmers' markets: Rachel Johnson meets American Nina Planck, who aims to put wholesome fresh food on everyone's plate

Financial Times, Jun 23, 2001
By RACHEL JOHNSON

The spirits lift at the first glimpse of US-born Nina Planck, champion of London's farmers' markets, when we meet at Smith's of Smithfield restaurant, in east London. She is waving at me cheerily across one of its three vast spaces and executes the American Welcome so guilelessly (you know the sort of greeting that says, "Now you guys have finally met, her happiness is complete") that I find myself kissing her on her velvety cheek.

Spirits soar even higher when I spot that Planck has taken full advantage of my late arrival to order a good bottle of white wine, and, most encouragingly, two glasses already appear to have been drunk.

But in spite of this undoubtedly auspicious start, there were aspects to Planck that troubled me. She is impossibly slender (I kept an eagle eye on her calorie intake during the course of our spartan lunch) but still looks as healthy and wholesome as a punnet of ripe strawberries.

She also has a book just published, called The Farmers' Market Cookbook (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99), which is full of dewy pictures of berries and squash and makes you want to rush home and dig a kitchen garden, or, failing that, to hot-foot it to your nearest farmers' market for purple sprouting broccoli.

Planck has been the driving force behind the 10 new farmers' markets in London over the past two years. She is young, light, has energy fizzing from every pore, and has achieved more in her 30 years than most women do in a lifetime.

Her CV looks normal enough: an American in London, a former news magazine journalist who has lived in Brussels.

But there is much more to her than a hackette who also happens to be fairly close to Hillary Clinton and who wrote speeches for US champion of the green movement, Ralph Nader [sic actually US Ambassador to the UK, Philip Lader].

Planck spent her childhood in the dreamy, hazy, rolling hills and creeks of Virginia's hunt country helping her parents, Chip and Susan, grow and sell fresh produce on a 60-acre farm in Wheatland. The first summer, they sold their fruit and vegetables at the roadside, and Nina, aged nine, would be attending the stall and taking the money.

As she writes in the foreword to her book: "We didn't sell much."

The following summer, 1980, the first farmers' markets opened in Greater Washington, DC, about an hour's drive away, and the Plancks took a truckload of beetroot and Swiss chard, and turned up an hour late at 8 a.m.

"We were amazed," she writes. "It was as if customers had waited all their lives to buy fresh produce in a car park on Saturday morning."

As we sit at Smith's, something about this simple, gritty childhood makes me long for a plate of greens and some home-cured ham, perhaps followed by a strawberry shortcake (a recipe for which Planck includes in her cookbook).

Instead, we both order fish, with Planck eschewing chips in favour of a side salad; I eat the entire contents of our large shared dish of buttered cabbage. To be fair, it is hard for us to do justice to the sort of fare Smith's serves, famed as it is for its premium, choice cuts of organic meat.

But eating less meant we talked more. And Planck has a good story to tell.

She used to get up at 6 a.m. to pick ears of corn in the cold dew before the day's heat turned the sugars in the sweet corn to starch. Her life revolved around fruit and vegetables. May meant strawberries, June meant hoeing and mulching, October pumpkins.

The business grew and soon the Plancks famed for 20 tomato varieties were sending up to seven trucks to four Saturday markets.

When Planck moved to London, she was homesick. Not so much for Virginia, but for the fresh seasonal produce she had grown up with. But what she wanted fresh English seasonal produce, straight from the farm - was nowhere to be found.

There were no farm shops in London. Organic box schemes did not suit her (expensive, badly handled, often imported produce). So she rented a site, disdained the indifference of the National Farmers' Union, which told her its members would not be interested, and started her own farmers' market.

With the chutzpah of a born entrepreneur she asked Nick Brown, the agriculture minister, to open it in 1999. There are now 10 such markets in London and she works full-time with London Farmers' Markets.

Now, she tells me, farmers who had never sold in this way before are making 75 per cent of their income from markets.

Using the hard lessons of her childhood, she is able to advise farmers on how to sell even more. "It was years before we wrote good signs and laminated them so they could be reused. It was years before we stopped growing things customers didn't want," she says in her marketing brief for farmers.

"Customers love signs. How do you cook it? Where is your farm? Why is it scarce? A sign might say 'We had a frost'. Or to explain why the apples have spots 'We don't spray.'". In fact, her paper is full of such homespun gems. If you have a better product than the stall next door, she says, charge more.

Undercutting on price [just to grab market share] is "anti-social and fails to respect the solidarity among producers". She champions the use of creative pricing instead such as giving bargains if you have a surplus.

She also promotes the offering of free samples of new varieties. Her mother's stall has signs saying "Our favourite cucumber" and "Try our best tomato". But her all-time "most effective" sign, says Planck, is the one that says: "We grow really good beans."

But she is here to publicise her cookbook and I ask her where that came from.

"I'm a home cook, I'm a food-is-regional person. I just wrote down everything we ate for a year." And yes, all the food in the book is bought from farmers' markets, which is, in turn, all grown within 100 miles of the M25.

Soon, UK viewers will be seeing Planck on Carlton television, with a series on regional produce, which she insists will be a complete departure from the genre of "waist-up chopping."

It could well be compelling viewing, but I would not be too surprised if Planck soon abandoned the food and farmers of Britain for her native US, where she is itching to get into politics.

But even if she managed to become US president, she would always, I suspect, remain equally proud of the fact that she and her parents grow really good beans. ?

© The Financial Times Limited