HB: Notice how a new food market in Boston is being pitched: It's for the tourists. ... Isn't it so cute? All those guys yelling and screaming and selling their fruits and vegetables and fish. It's just like Paris!

MWMD Spy: It’s funny. They should actually model it after the Union Square market in NYC. It is real farmers who sell real food to people who live in Manhattan and are sick of eating cardboard vegetables from Korean Deli’s. The market actually transformed the neighborhood and now there are a string of restaurants around the edge of the market that prepare food from the farms. Creating a “market” for tourists will end up with Yankee fried dough, Boston corn dogs, Colonial Ice cream parlour, etc, etc. By the way, isn’t this what Quincy Market was supposed to be before it got run over by conglomerates?


HB: I noticed how the article didn't mention New York's market, which is a real market, not a fake market designed to look cute. Of course, Boston really does have an old-fashioned market with screaming, honest-to-God lunatics: Haymarket, for all its lousy-food faults, every weekend. But the vendors also aren't cute and don't sell Chilean bass and they don't bow to their obvious betters when they sell you two lemons in cute brown-paper bags. So we got to come up with a make-believe market. It's much safer, after all. ...