A Day at the Wallingford Farmers' Market

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?"

Land Grab

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.

Market Gear

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...

First Garden Meal

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.

A Week Away

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.

Cooking Radishes

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.

Enough

The past few weeks it's hit home for me that my sales this summer aren't going to be quite what I had hoped they would be. Most markets are down about 10% compared to this period last year, though Lake City is down by 50%. Wallingford is about the same as it was a year ago, and Queen Anne and the U District are up a bit, for reasons that have mainly to do with location and visibility. But my overriding realization is that, even though my sales won't meet my projections, there will be enough. If things continue as they have been, I'll still be able to cover my expenses, support myself, pay my taxes, save a bit for the winter, and pay off what I borrowed to move into my new kitchen. And that's what really counts.