My business has launched a new promotion at our farmers' market booths: we're offering half off any menu item to folks who are unemployed. We're not asking for proof; all you have to do is ask.
We've been pleased with the response. At most markets we've had two or three people taking advantage of the offer, but at Lake City the number was closer to ten. This made sense because our sales at Lake City have been down more dramatically than at any other market.
I'm hoping to give some unemployed folks a reason to go to the farmers' market. We seem to be caught in a conundrum where so many people are short on cash because the current economic model is unsustainable, yet the alternative--for better or for worse--often asks us to spend extra.
It's true that you can find plenty of fairly priced food at the farmers' market (including my own products) if you know where to look. There are also a variety of food stamp benefits that can be used at market stalls. And a number of studies recently have found that produce at local markets is actually cheaper on average than items of comparable quality at neighborhood groceries. But if you have little or no money to spare you'll undoubtedly find yourself making difficult choices during a market outing.
Personally I think that the short-term solution, the best way to navigate the current economic and culinary climate, is for us to make peace with the idea of a hybrid, transitional food system. It's too expensive and time consuming for most of us to fuss over every ingredient in every food that we put into our bodies. At the same time it's very important for every one of us to be thinking about what we're eating and why. We all have our own biases and emphases, and we all choose our own particular lines to draw (or not.)
Perhaps a special discount for unemployed folks is a roundabout way of communicating this message. It's not a sexy message, or the kind of message that inspires evangelism. But I hope some elements of it will gradually filter out and be heard.
I'm always excited to see a new book about the role of food in history. It's a fertile and fascinating topic that has been largely unexplored until relatively recently.
There are so many ways to approach this subject, so many insights and stories waiting to be woven together. Tom Standage's "An Edible History of Humanity" did, in fact, introduce me to some episodes that I haven't seen addressed in any other history of humans and food, such as the role that food provisioning has played in different wars, and the devastating famines in the Soviet Union and China during the mid twentieth century, brought about largely by the respective governments' policies aimed at convincing the rest of the world that they actually had a surplus of grain.
But Standage devotes a considerable amount of space to praising the "green revolution," the development and widespread use of nitrogen-based fertilizer and the use of hybrid seed varieties that have dramatically increased agricultural productivity during the past century, while relying disproportionately on nonrenewable energy sources and wrecking longstanding traditions in many parts of the world.
He makes the fascinating point that industrialization has almost always followed on the heels of a period of accelerated agricultural activity: in order to develop an economy where most people work at endeavors other than farming, a society first needs to figure out a way to feed more bodies with fewer people actually working the land.
Although he acknowledges that there have been drawbacks to the industrial agricultural practices that have gone hand in hand with modernization, and he assures the reader that organic agriculture will have to play a role in the next green revolution, his biases are clear simply by virtue of the amount of space he devotes to marvelling at the amazing productivity of modern agricultural technology. As someone who questions the virtues of unfettered industrialization, I was less than convinced, though I still thought it was a pretty good read.
Yesterday I worked at the Wallingford Farmers' Market for the first time ever because Adam, the guy who usually mans my booth there, asked for the day off. He hardly ever asks for time off and I happened to have been able to cover the shift, so I did.
Business was just fine-not off the charts, but it's been a very slow couple of weeks so it was encouraging to be at a relatively small market and see steady traffic.
I'd had a dream the night before that I'd gone to see Richard Thompson, a musician who I adore, only it wasn't him performing but some other guy who did reasonably competent versions of his songs, but it just wasn't the same. I figured the dream was my way of working out some of my anxiety about whether the quality of my food suffers when I'm not at the markets personally. People do come up to me sometimes and say, "It's not the same when you're not there," but I can't be everywhere.
But as soon as I pulled up to my booth at Wallingford yesterday folks started asking, "Where's Adam?"
One of the items on the agenda at last week's G8 summit was the growing trend of developed nations appropriating tracts of land belonging to developing nations. During the past 3 years an area half the size of France has been taken this way.
There is nothing new about this, in fact, people with means have been claiming title to as much land as possible since Babylonian times, and probably even before then. Land grabs created the basis for the repressive medieval feudal system and have been behind the consolidation of agriculture in the United States which has driven so many family farms off their land.
It's hard to believe that any substantive results can be achieved by the leaders of nations founded on similar policies. Still, I'm encouraged to see the issue addressed at this international conference, even if the only immediate result is a consensus acknowledging that it's wrong to displace small-scale farmers for the sake of international trade.
This is my nephew Sam wearing my Ballard Farmers Market sweatshirt and watching the sunrise over the Grand Canyon. (Actually, I just love this picture and was looking for an excuse to use it.)
I have quite a few articles of clothing with logos from different farmers' markets, but I try to be careful to not wear the wrong shirt to the wrong market. I wouldn't exactly say there's bad feeling between the administrators of different (competing?) markets, but as a vendor I do sometimes feel like I'm doing a careful dance trying not to step on anyone's toes.
I'm guessing that these administrators' feelings towards one another must be similar to the way I feel about the other prepared food vendors. I like them as human beings and I generally respect the work they do but, having made my own choices to do things in my own way, I often find myself finding fault with the way they run their operations. It makes me crazy when someone comes up to my booth and asks me where they can find a competing prepared food vendor. That must me similar to what some market administrators experience when they see vendors wearing gear advertising other organizations' markets.
Or maybe they don't even think about it at all, and I'm fabricating an issue where none actually exists...
After being gone for a week it was exciting to come back and see how much my garden had grown. Yesterday I enjoyed my first meal made up of produce primarily from my own backyard. I cooked up some veggies with pasta, using collard greens, kale, broccoli, snow peas, fennel, onions, parsley, and summer savory that I grew myself. (I also used some zucchini and garlic from the farmers' market.)
When I read blogs written by seasoned gardeners I often feel humbled by the small scale of my own efforts and my considerable lack of knowledge and experience. But it was truly inspiring for me to prepare this meal.
I think what I'm going to enjoy the most about having this garden is being able to pick small quantities of herbs whenever I need them. I tend to buy fresh herbs in the supermarket even though the price is outrageous, there's far too much packaging, and I often can't use all of what I buy before they go bad. Having them fresh and ready right out my back door is a wonderful solution.
I just got back from spending a week on a tour bus in Arizona, Utah, and Vegas, with sixteen members of my immediate family. Years ago, when my mother first proposed the trip, I'd said there was no way I could be gone for a week in the middle of the summer. But as the time drew closer I realized I'd be crazy not to go, so I said I would and then figured out the details.
The trip was a very good time. My family loves to eat, and we ate and ate. Meals were included, including desserts and appetizers, and it took nearly the entire week to learn to eat without overeating. I was especially taken with these petroglyphs which, not surprisingly, I assumed had something to do with someone's dinner many years ago.
My trusty employees did 14 farmers' markets in my absence. (They were supposed to do 15, but nobody's perfect.) When I showed up yesterday morning the kitchen looked very clean and things were flowing so smoothly that I felt delightfully obsolete, but they assured me that's hardly the case.
Several years ago, overwhelmed by the number of radishes showing up in my CSA box, I did a bit of research into whether or not you could cook them. I'd never seen a cooked radish, and I was accumulating more of them than I could happily eat as part of my--almost daily--salad.
I browsed through several cookbooks but no recipes called for cooking them, so I continued to eat them raw. I suppose I could have just gone ahead and tried, but I didn't.
Several weeks ago my employees started bring them back to the kitchen from the markets: some of the farmers who we buy from were offering them, and the price was right. So we cut them up and cooked them, and we found them both tasty and colorful. We've been using them ever since, and I've done some subsequent research and learned that cooking them isn't nearly as strange as I had once believed.
I strongly believe that, if the sustainable food movement is going to really make a difference in the way we source food and use the resources that go into producing food, we've got to challenge preconceptions about all kinds of things, from what we discard to where we shop. This experience with the radishes gave me the opportunity to discard a different kind of preconception: one that dictated that there was only one acceptable way to eat radishes.
