Two old blokes were having a chat at the EPIC markets (or as they are more properly known, the Capital Region Farmers Market) last Saturday.
One says to the other: ''Did you hear the joke about Woolworths? The one where it claims to support local farmers?''
If you've had no media in your life for the past week, you won't know that Woolworths has committed to cutting the price of fruit and vegetables. Or that Coles has. Or they both have, and will pay you to take their tomatoes. Joke.
Which is all very well if you are a keen and dedicated supermarket shopper and have no choice. Supermarkets are useful if both money and time are tight.
In the meantime, farmers are meant to make do with less money. And it's all very well if you are a megafarmer and scale your production to meet the supermarket cost targets. But some farmers can't - and won't - do it.
Farmers Markets last Saturday: Packed. Best turn-up of stallholders. Best turn-up of customers. Although they would say that. Still, there is now a waiting list to get a stall (seasonally adjusted) and about 100 stalls each week.
Bill Watson, on the management committee for the markets, freely admits that stallholders can't compete on price with supermarkets. They do, however, compete with each other.
''We could never compete with industrial machinery,'' he confesses. These are, mostly, small farmers who have no interest in going big - or can't because they are too new. But Watson says stallholders must follow strict compliance with market rules - and that's where he believes the produce beats supermarket fare any day. Got to be grown and sold by the producer. Must be fresh. Watson and his team do little mystery visits to make sure. (On top of this goodness, Rotary has donated a million bucks to charities since the market's inception. Eighth birthday comes up this year - March or April, Watson thinks.)
David and Kate Dickson bought Borenore Berry Farm near Orange 20 years ago. Berries everywhere - straw, black, blue, rasp. And every Saturday morning David leaves home with berries picked in the last three days - at about 1.30am to get to EPIC by 5am. He got out of the supermarket game when he realised the chains had the upper hand. He'd been selling snow peas into a central market but got jack of it.
''You become a price-taker - and we were never happy with the price we got,'' he says. ''You lose control of your quality, your shelf-life ... everything disappears.''
And there's one other loss when we shop at big chains - have you ever asked the checkout chap what sprays and fertilisers are used on the bok choy you plan to buy? If you even get a checkout chap instead of one of those infernal do-it-yourself-badly machines. David, on the other hand, says he has long conversations with customers and dispenses free advice on pruning. You don't get that at the checkout.
Helen Chu could give quite a lot of advice at her Majestic Mushrooms stall on Saturdays - such as how to leave primary teaching, bring up six kids and start a mushroom farm. She and husband Ian, a former engineer, grow portobellos and Swiss browns as well as the more traditional white buttons and flat white caps and sell them direct to greengrocers as well as at EPIC.
She admits they can't compete on price but they can certainly compete on what art dealers might describe as provenance - where something comes from. Chu claims you can never be entirely sure of the provenance of imported foods.
''We grow our mushrooms in a protected environment in compost made in Australia and in chicken manure - it is not human faeces.
''My kids eat these mushrooms. We know where they are grown and how they are grown.''
And for Phil McCormack, the man behind Lost River Produce's grass-fed cattle and sheep, the choice between being a markets stallholder and a producer for Big Aisle, boils down to this: ''We are sick of getting ripped off. The margins are not good enough, so we are going out there and doing it ourselves, going to markets, opening our own shops. We've got full control, how we advertise, what specials we can put on.'' There is a breeze of relief in his voice.
Lost River opens a butchery in Dickson next week. The Chus have moved into the Canberra Centre and as soon as they can find the time, they will change the name of the fruit shop to Majestic.
It's been a long time since I've shopped in one of the major supermarkets. I'm no brand junkie but liked buying Seppelt's White Vinegar all those years ago; and the paper-wrapped Delsey toilet paper even if it is made by Kimberly-Clark.
The crunch came when supermarkets started to sell Truss tomatoes that tasted no better than the cricket balls of old. Sure, they looked as if they'd come off the vine. But those stems and leaves indicated nothing more than a tenuous relationship with the Truss tomatoes of even five years ago.
Break the supermarket hegemony. Shop local from farmers and throw out less.
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