I had never been to the farmer's market. The Saturday farmer's market is quite an affair in Bloomington, with around 50 participating farms and, depending on the day, miscellaneous vendors, arts and crafts stalls, musicians, chess tournaments, and even a man with a parrot. By July, and nearing the end of the summer, after missing Saturday after Saturday, I finally got my act together and visited the considerably smaller Tuesday market (I kept sleeping too late on Saturday, and Tuesday afternoon seemed like an easier goal than Saturday morning). Upon arriving, despite there being only a dozen stands available to choose from, I immediately knew that I should have come sooner. I walked from stand to stand and bought blackberries, a cucumber, an eggplant, peaches, a zucchini, tomatoes, onions, green beans, potatoes, and way too much corn. Okay fine, I bought way too much food period, but I was so entranced by the selection! All local and all organic! Well... at least the first part is true. It turned out that I had a lot to learn about farmer's market shopping. Actually, I had a lot to learn about farmers, and, I'll be honest, food.
First lesson: Not all food at the farmer's market is organic. Some local farmers rely just as heavily on synthetic chemicals as big industrial farms do to get rid of bugs and weeds (of course in smaller amounts), especially if they grow produce that isn't well suited to the climate. For example, one farmer told me that the humidity in Indiana makes his peaches ripen too quickly, and he loses too much product if he doesn't spray (now, how peaches are able to grow in Georgia if this is the case is beyond me, but that's what he told me, or at least something like it). Farmers that choose in-demand products over local-climate-suited ones are more likely to need to spray due to climate-produce incompatibilities. Additionally, some bugs are more common in certain areas than others. Indiana seems to have trouble with cabbage worms. Even the most natural and organic farmers I've spoken with still spray their cabbage with Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, a bacterium that kills cabbage worms, but is basically harmless to everything else: Wikipedia will give you the general idea and Pesticideinfo.org will give you the details. Insects also like some foods better than others. Berries are soft, sweet, and easy to get to. What bug wouldn't take a bite? In any case, when it comes to questions about pest and weed control, ASK. The answers may surprise you. Even some certified organic farms use sprays for pest control, and I tend to prefer more sustainable methods that discourage pests while still encouraging beneficial insects and plants.
This brings me to my first point: You can't ask your grocery store what kind of farmer they are. No two farmers do things exactly alike. While slapping the label "organic" on some tomatoes might be enough for some, I want to know HOW organic they are. Were they sprayed with organic sprays? If so, are these sprays toxic to other beneficial insects, plants, animals, the earth, or even people? Were they planted on a giant farm that uses fossil fuels and rototillers to till its beds? Or were they grown in a smaller patch that can be tilled by hand? Were they covered with hard-to-recycle plastic to protect them from the frost in early spring? Or were more recyclable/reusable materials used? What is their farmer's philosophy about farming? Does he/she try to coexist with nature, or dominate it? The next time you eat a sandwich, think for a second: who grew that tomato you just put in your mouth? What kind of person is he/she? Do you even care? That works both ways. If you don't know/care who they are, they certainly don't feel any closer or more obligated to you. When you aren't involved with the people who buy your products, it's you hardly wonder if they're having a healthy and happy experience. Having the ability to talk to farmers about the veggies I'm putting in my soup later is freeing. I don't have to picture industrial-potato-farm-with-a-million-potatoes-that-were-driven-100-miles-to-get-here-and-who-knows-what-happened-between-the-farm-and-my-mouth scenarios as I'm eating. This thinking applies doubly when you consider products like eggs and meat (which are also available at many farmer's markets): it's especially comforting to know where these often contaminated products originated.
Second lesson: If they aren't selling bell peppers, it's because there aren't any bell peppers. Surprise! Food only grows certain times of the year! Bell peppers don't grow in February in Indiana. So unless the farmers preserve, store, or grow their produce indoors or in greenhouses, they can't sell you bell peppers in February.
This brings me to my second point: The produce at the grocery store did not arrive by magic. It arrived by truck, boat, plane, train, whatever you want to picture traveling thousands of miles to make it to your local produce aisle. "We're consuming about 400 gallons of oil a year per citizen--about 17 percent of our nation's energy use--for agriculture...Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles" (Kingsolver, 5). Not only this, but buying food from another country, is NOT helping the workers/farmers that live there. "Developed nations promote domestic overproduction of commodity crops that are sold on the international market at well below market price, undermining the fragile economies of developing countries...Global trade deals negotiated by the World Trade Organization and World Bank allow corporations to shop for food from countries with the poorest environmental, safety, and labor conditions. While passing bargains on to consumers, this pits farmers in one country against those in another, in a downward wage spiral" (66-7). This means that you're not helping the local farmers, AND you're not getting a high quality product. You're getting the cheapest stuff that big name produce distributor company could find regardless of safety/health concerns, bought for the lowest price possible (thus supplying very little income at the bottom of the farm hierarchy to your average worker), and sold to you at a price that is making them rich: "...the CEO of Dole Inc.... [is] worth $1.4 billion" (66). When you buy from the farmer's market, your produce probably traveled less than 30 miles (and probably more like 10 miles), and it IS helping the farmer you buy it from. You get to watch them put the whole $1.50 in their pocket when you buy a butternut squash.
Third lesson: It's easier to be creative when you have random vegetables in the house. After enjoying the browsing and buying of the market and getting to know a few of the farmers, I did some research online to supplement what I already knew, and decided to buy a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) winter share. I paid about $80 for six weeks, and each week I go to the farmers market to pick up a half bushel of produce. I'm on the fourth week, and I have never eaten so interestingly or deliciously in my life. Granted, it takes a little recipe research to keep up, but after an adult life full of repetitive meals of spaghetti and pizza (and the occasional pad thai or matar paneer, okay I was already a little creative), it is awesome to make a tenth variety of home-made soup, or figure out what you're supposed to do with two heads of cabbage (I recommend stuffed cabbage, super delicious, seriously, I know it doesn't sound great, but really it is), or what sunchokes are, or how to eat radishes, or turnips, or the greens that come attached to them. Plus, the more variety, the more vitamins. If my hard-working organs could talk, I bet they would be thanking me for the $10 raise they get every time I eat a bag of mesclun mix for lunch.
Which, of course, brings me to my third point: Vitamins are complicated and they work better together when you get them from natural sources. "Both vitamin pills and vegetables are loaded with essential nutrients, but not in the same combinations. Spinach is a good source of both vitamin C and iron. As it happens, vitamin C boosts iron absorption, allowing the body to take in more of it than if the mineral were introduced alone... Our bodies aren't adapted to absorb big loads of nutrients all at once... but tiny quantities of them in combinations--exactly as they occur in plants. Thousands of the phytochemicals [chemicals that occur naturally in plants] we eat haven't even been studied or named yet, because there are so many, with such varied roles, finely tuned as fuel for our living bodies. A head of broccoli contains more than a thousand" (Kingsolver, 60). The Mayo Clinic also supports diet over supplements, stating, "Supplements aren't intended to be a food substitute because they can't replicate all of the nutrients and benefits of whole foods, such as fruits and vegetables" (Mayo Clinic on Vitamins). The article goes on to discuss additional nutrients, such as the aforementioned phytochemicals, that occur naturally in fruits and vegetables but are not in vitamin supplements.
In conclusion?
For me, doing my part to make a difference when it comes to carbon footprints and poverty is enough reason to eat local. But the heavy stuff aside, I also like to eat local for the relationship it gives me with food and the way it make me feel about eating. I have already learned so much about how plants grow and which parts of them we eat (i.e. a potato is a root, a tomato is a fruit that grows in the place of a small yellow flower, etc.), or even if I already knew the information from a text book, I feel like I understand the information better now that I'm interacting with these phenomena on a more intimate basis. I get to be a bigger part of the food process (including all of the cooking), and I get to make clearer decisions about what I eat and what I don't. I also get more variety due to changing availability of produce over the season (both due to climate and the farmer's planting choices). Plus, going to the farmer's market is just plain fun! Honestly, I'm the kind of person who likes grocery shopping, and the supermarket pales in comparison to the joys of the farmers market and its quaint stalls and friendly farmers (and not-so-friendly ones). So, whether you want to save the world or just change up your diet a bit:
Look for local farms and farmer's markets in your area at http://www.localharvest.org/.
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