I spent this afternoon wandering around Mahane Yehuda, the famous shuk (market) in Jerusalem. This indoor/outdoor market bursts with fruit and vegetable stands, bags of spices: rosehips, paprika, chili pepper, and curry…, baskets of roasted pecans, dried apricots, and dates, drippy buckets of herbed olives, cuts of meat hanging in refrigerated cases, and a few scattered bread and pastry stalls selling crusty breads and phyllo-wrapped treats. The stalls function a little like the kiddush table at shul, with grandmothers and youngsters elbowing each other out of the way to edge themselves closer to the best goods.

Israelis and tourists alike revere the shuk as a place to get “the freshest produce ever” (it seems that people speak in hyperbole about everything in Israel). A friend of mine who studied at Hebrew University recounts her weekly trips to the shuk where her lunch consisted of a seedless cucumber, a fresh, red tomato, and a hunk of bread. “That’s all I needed,” she wistfully recalled.

But to be honest (and I realize this might be blasphemous to admit), I was underwhelmed by shuk. The halva was by far “the best I’ve ever tatsted.” The pistachio-encrusted block I purchased offered an incredible mix of textures and flavors that, like good wine, changed over time: a dry flaky sweetness that melted into a smooth natural peanut butter-consistency, and left the lingering flavor of almonds.

So, the halva was great - but the produce? Meh. The scale and quantity of it was impressive (though no more so than Fairway in New York or most Whole Foods stores), But overall the flavor and freshness paled in comparison to the just-picked flavor of the carrots I picked at Chava v’Adam, the delicate crunch of summer radishes in my Brooklyn CSA share, the leafy kale at the Park Slope Food Coop, or the buttery lettuce at the Union Square farmer’s markets. Additionally, I felt no connection to where the food was grown - the shuk offered a bazaar of color and variety, but it didn’t seem like the merchants were also the farmers. It seemed that many of them could have as been selling shoes as happily as they were selling grapefruits.

I guess that, living in Brooklyn I’ve just gotten used to the “best produce in the world.”