In my area of North London, the white middle-class is reprogenetizing at an alarming rate. Everywhere I go in my neighbourhood, I see caucasian women of child-bearing age who are either pregnant or pushing prams, sometimes both. At moments, I am beset by a certain paranoia: could this fecundity be the after-effect of the radioactive Thalium that killed ex-KGB man Litvinenko? After all, he lived a street down from where I am, and his route, for the couple of days before he discovered he was contaminated, would have been right through the precinct. The truth, as often happens, is more mundane; the glow on the faces of these mums-nouveaux and to-be mothers is clearly provided by their new or impending matru-ness; a bliss-maternal that is untrammelled by any fear of the ice-caps melting or Dorset turning into a sub-Saharan mini-desert during the lifetimes of the ruddy offspring they are pelting down on the local birth registrars.

Form is all, however, and the young Englisher keeps to the one that society gives her or him, same as the preceding generations. The huge receptacle for returned plastic bags at the local supermarket is always stuffed; the recycling boxes in front of houses in this borough are always correctly filled to the brim with paper, glass, and — separately — food waste (no bones, mind); most people have some visible stain of what one might in Bangla call ‘Greenota’, that is, some indicator that they feel they belong, a) to planet Earth, b) that they care about it, sentiently so, and are willing to sacrifice the excesses and cruderies of Gross Western Consumers from whom they derive, and c) that this is the only way to be really cool.

One of the most entertaining arenas in which this is played out is the Sunday farmer’s market that shifts between two locations near the Victorian pile called Alexandra Palace. This grand exhibition hall, long dubbed Ally Pally in local parlance, is also the site of humankind’s first television broadcast (in the mid-Thirties) and, more recently, the European Social Forum. Most of the time, though, it stands sullen and silent, overlooking a beautiful slope that opens on to a grand vista of London. If you avoid the temptations of the grotty pub housed in one corner of the edifice, and all the plastic ice-cream vans that surround its steps, and if you trample across a wooded path on the side of one of the Palace’s car-parks, you come across what looks like a noiseless village fair. This is what I call the Ally Pally Haat.

Alexandra Palace was specifically built to provide North London and its adjoining rural areas with a space to house the grand exhibitions so loved by 19th-century Britons. Walking through the crumbling façades and peering into the huge halls you can easily imagine elephants shivering in a freezing English May and Indian rope-tricksters and African drummers and natives plucked from the Amazon jungle and such. Walking through the farmer’s market, you get a not dissimilar feeling, except that the exotica is local and most of it isn’t moving. There, contemplating a properly misshapen sweet potato, you could be forgiven for thinking you’re back in a village market in India, but the moment you come across the chard covered in authentic grit or the Jerusalem artichokes still married to their soil or the bumpy red potatoes freckled with black spots or the pugnacious little brussels sprouts, you know you are in some exclusive north European Zoo of the Vegetable. The beautiful waft of cooking meat distracts you, though, from overly ‘niramatious’ thoughts: stretched out in what looks like one of those American suntanning machines, is a whole carcass of pig, rolling slowly over on a giant spit, releasing delicious bodily frangrances with every jerk of the gear.

Alongside the vegetables and fruit there is indeed meat of every kind; the veg & fruit & meat all muscularly proclaiming their organicity, their free-range-ness, their purity, their natural prophylactization from pesticides, genetic mutation and dreaded additives. Most of the stuff is a lustrous illustration of what pre-supermarket English produce must have looked like, maybe half a century ago or more. But then, in a multi-ethnic city such as London, there is no way a market such as this would be purely gora. Sure enough, there are West Indian stalls, Turkish ones and also the odd desis. Past the jerk-chicken and Birds Eye chili pickle vendor, right next to the guy selling six different kinds of apple juice (Oh, my India! Oh, my Gold Coin!), is a Brit-Gujju selling various condiments and something he calls an “Indian savoury pie”. It is pointless to describe to those not familiar with the splendours of Gujarati home-cooking this thing called haandvo, but, at £2.50 a slice, there it is, this thing my mother used to conjure about once a week as a snack (“Not fried! So, very healthy! Better than all those dosas you love!”). I kick down my stingy Ahmedabadi gene and purchase a piece and it is quite good — tastes quite authentic. Also goes very nicely with the apple juice from some strange sounding Suffolk breed of the fruit (Oh, my Gujarat! Oh, my haandvo!).

One hears quibbles, of course; this being England, how could one not? Standing on the sideline on a freezing Sunday, watching some teenage boys energetically hack at each other with studded sports boots in a game they insist on calling ‘football’, I hear one of the boy’s mothers asking a father, “Not going to the farmer’s market then? Me neither. Really can’t bring myself to buy three tomatoes for two pounds, I can’t!” But I know she will go, if not this Sunday then the next, as will the father who grunts in assent — maybe not the tomatoes but perhaps the pig, or perhaps the birch-smoked mature cheddar cheese, or perhaps, who knows, the rapaciously priced haandvo will draw these North Londoners like filings to a magnet.

It really is terrible what is happening in Gaza, and also in Ghana, and really terribly bad, the scenario in Peru, but none of this will stop these cultured middle-class Londoners from carrying their clutch of (used and worn) supermarket plastic bags and burying themselves in the pleasures of ethically sound consumption. Not them and not me, it has to be quickly admitted; but I can still hide behind the thin excuse of being a visitor. As I watch the prams proliferate faster than cars in Delhi, as I watch the changing seasons being marked by the changing vegetables in the stalls, this misanthropic visitor in me can’t but help feel the pincers of envy. Not only can these happy people afford to mostly reject the supermarkets many people in India still crave and dream about, they can do it deeply basted in the conviction that, in doing so, they are simultaneously doing their bit to stave off global disaster. No surprise then, that the ones of child-producing age do not hesitate to get on with it, their pipes cleansed and charged with fresh veg and lean cuts of beautiful meat.

As I trudge back home, loaded with purple-sprouting broccoli, ‘farm-fresh’ eggs, a luscious bit of lamb or beef and a loaf of soda bread, I suddenly feel a fury at these smug natives driving off in their Audis and Priuses. I want to render them randomly, just kidnap them and, as a punishment, force them to shop in one of our new supermarket chains, force them to look at the devastation of Calcutta’s local markets, make them eat Bengal battery chicken which may or may not have bird flu (“I’m not telling you! Finish eating and wait to find out the hard way! If you don’t, you’ll never see another Premiership or Wimbledon!”), bury them in industrial white bread.

“Your forefathers invented this garbage and you’re not going to get away from it so easily!” I want to say, but of course, I don’t. Instead I just make a mental list of what nice things I want to try and pick up next Sunday, of what, in this three-tomatoes-for two-pound world is affordable, and I tell myself how it is only natural that the baby-buggies they have now are so much more ergonomically advanced than when I had to drive one up and down these slopes.