Mercado de Jamaica at 5am

Flower stalls at Mercado de Jamaica before dawn — —The marigold section. The yellow is almost violent in the dark.

The flower market opens before the city does. By five in the morning the trucks are already unloaded and the stalls are full: birds of paradise, dahlias, marigolds, tuberoses, something orange I couldn't name.

There's a particular smell that is only flowers in large quantities in a cold morning — almost animal, almost sweet, and underneath it something slightly fermented. It's not a clean smell. It's alive.

I was there to buy nothing. I wandered for an hour drinking too-sweet coffee from a styrofoam cup, which is the correct vessel for this kind of outing.

The buyers who come at this hour are not decorators or hobbyists. They are florists who have shops opening in four hours, caterers who have events this afternoon, families preparing for a quinceañera or a funeral. Commerce conducted in the dark, before the city has remembered it exists.

The mycology parallel: the mycelium network does most of its work in the dark too. Most of what matters is infrastructure.

#food #mycology #mexico city