Two hands slice a cured meat with a long knife on a wooden board; beside it, brass scales, a ball of string and a wheel of pecorino.

Taste and territory

Food Shop

The food shop produces almost nothing, and precisely for that reason it is a craft. Its work is to choose: to go to the market at dawn, to taste, to reject, to keep up the relationship with those who grow and those who age, and then to put on the counter only what it can answer for in person.

It is the oldest trade in commerce and the first to have been declared dead. In fact what died is the shop that sold the same things as the supermarket at a higher price. The one that remains sells something the supermarket does not have, namely somebody who puts their own face to it.

A paved alley with a stone arch at the end; through the open door of a shop, hams hang inside, and on the step stand a crate of vegetables and a zinc bucket.

Where

Where it is practised in Tuscany

It is an urban craft, and in Tuscany it is concentrated where there are still neighbourhoods with a life of their own: the quarters of Livorno, the Oltrarno and the market districts of Firenze, the historic centres of Pisa, Lucca and Arezzo, the villages of the Chianti and the Val d'Orcia where the shop is the only one left.

In the smaller villages it is often the last commercial presence: the shop closes and the village loses at once its shopping, its meeting point and the person who notices if somebody has not come out of the house for two days. It is a function that appears in no set of accounts.

Brass scales with weights, a long knife and a cleaver on the board, a roll of greaseproof paper, a ball of string and a wheel of cheese.

How

The techniques of the craft

Selection: recognising the right ripeness, understanding at a glance whether an artichoke was picked yesterday or last week. Cutting: slicing a prosciutto to the thickness that that prosciutto asks for, which is never the same for every one.

Ageing: keeping cheeses and cured meats in a cold room almost always carved out of a back room, controlling humidity and temperature by nose before by thermometer. And advice: knowing what to suggest to somebody who comes in without knowing what they want, which is the part that holds up all the others.

Many shops have added a wine bar and the making up of hampers.

Inside a food shop: shelves of bottles and jars, hams hanging from the beam and a marble counter; at the back, a man in an apron works with his back to the camera.

Now

The craft today

The arithmetic is hard: rents in the historic centres, long hours, tight margins on every single product. Those who hold out do so by specialising — the wine bar, corporate hampers, prepared food, shipping — or by spreading over several addresses to keep the same suppliers turning.

The push that helps comes from consumers who have stopped treating price as the only figure: those looking for the short supply chain, those who want to know the producer's name, those who prefer to buy less and better. The food shop was already serving that demand before it became a trend.

The producers of this craft

Al Bottegone Al BottegoneVia Demi, Livorno Alimentari Procissi Alimentari ProcissiLocalità Capanna, Altopascio