Honestly not … good professionals that take some pride in their products are very rare here.
Eventually 100% of them got greedy and did what I mentioned earlier and 100% of them are no longer in business.
It got so bad here that people are now loath to even trust anything “family run” … It is kind of amusing to think about living in the countryside and not trusting to buy eggs or local produce, from local farmers, but here we are.
Top of the list are the “local farmers” selling olive oil or olives … I used to harvest my trees and make my own olive oil and things are so bad that for the past years, when it is harvest time, I go to the olive extraction refinery with my containers and I buy “directly from the tap”.
Once the oil is out from the refinery and “gone home”, noone trusts that what they are buying is fresh oil from this year.
As for olives? I’ll take my chances at the supermarket, thank you very much.
Imagine being so insane to try to cheat other people in the same local area on the one thing that everyone and their dog know how to gauge its quality. In a market once the trust is gone, it is very hard to re-establish it. And if they realise that you are “not from around here” or you are a tourist? God help you.
Really, let’s say you visit Greece and a local farmer tells you that he has home-made olive oil, olives and tsipouro/ouzo … how can you tell if it is this year’s or last year’s or, even worse two or three years old. I can tell with oil and the local heavy drinkers can tell with ouzo, but a tourist? Not a chance.
So, they can sell you the “old stock”
Eggs are worse.
How can you tell a supermarket egg that is sold as “family-run from a barn”?
You can’t tell from the outside.
And the only way to know is if you break it and say “oh the yolk is richer in color and the albumen a bit thicker” and every farmer will tell you “yeah usually, but not always” and that will be the truth.
So, they can sell you 4 barn eggs and two from the super-market and you’ll never know, unless you used to have your own chickens.
That’s how those people baking “traditional spinach pies” got “caught” … people could tell that they had swifted from their own local eggs and materials to “store-bought”, but we have all eaten in our lifetimes a hillside’s worth of spinach baked in a pie.
So, just as a foreign tourist is a “sitting duck” for a farmer to trick, the same goes for a city dweller of the same country.
It is like playing Go vs a pro without a handicap. If they want to trick you, they can do so easily.