Stephanie Grace

As New Orleans continues its slow slog towards recovery from Hurricane Katrina, the first signs of new life in still-devastated neighbourhoods have often been the markets. It’s fitting that the city that boasts America’s oldest urban bazaar — the newly refurbished French Market in the unflooded French Quarter — should see community markets as a vehicle for economic rebirth, as well as an answer to the absence of national retailers. In addition to several weekly markets that date back pre-Katrina, there are now regular farmers’ markets in the Upper Ninth Ward, Lakeview and Broadmoor, with more planned.

New Orleans always had a split personality. There was the picture-postcard city that visitors enjoyed: lovely, languid, funky, obsessed with food and music and bon temps, in the local parlance. Then there was workaday New Orleans, home to poverty that would have shocked the rest of America and the developed world if they had seen it. On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed that other side for all to see. Residents who filled the Superdome, who lined the streets around the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center waiting for days for food, water, help, were in many cases the same people who filled the low-wage service jobs that made the tourist economy tick. Local leaders were left with a conundrum. Without tourism, which pre-Katrina employed 75,000 people, there could be no recovery.