The Market Is Open

ALFN Members,

Follow the link to fresh food and local artisan products…the market is open.

As many of you know, shopping at a farmers’ market or online local market is fundamentally different than shopping at a grocery store. We visit grocery stores with expectations of an almost limitless stock. The meats and veggies seem to rise up from the bottom of the shelves and display centers on an eternal conveyor belt. The only time we may notice a shortage of items is when a snowstorm is threatening to hit in a few hours. However, the rest of the year, rain or shine, freezing or hot, the food seems to magically appear from nowhere. We find it difficult to consciously hold the question of origin for every food item, every time we visit a grocery store: How did this food get here? How has the product changed since it was cut out of the fields?

These questions are black holes that seem to lead us nowhere. And this place of nowhere is exactly the origin of so much of our food. Have you every considered the sheer quantity and control it takes to supply stores with a steady stream of carrots or ground beef?

A farmers’ market is a different shopping experience. We intuitively know that when people buy all the lettuce at a farmer’s stand, there won’t be any more that magically appears. The connection of consumer to farmer provides a rational and realistic bedrock that grounds our assumptions about the origin of food. Growing food takes time on limited space. Food cycles back on itself in arcs of sustainability, but food doesn’t come from an eternal source. The hoe reaches the end of a row and only so many lettuce heads can fit on a bed of soil.

So we enter the local farmers’ market with a different set of expectations that are more realistic. Items run out. Severe storms can destroy produce intended for harvest. Local shoppers of local food understand this dynamic. And I would argue, local shoppers are more grounded in the reality of food production. I would even extend that argument and suggest local shoppers of local food can have more robust virtues such as patience, understanding and empathy. This local food virtue is solely born out of making the connection secure between farmer and consumer. When a local farmer runs out of a product during the week, we can recognize the real limits and scale of local farms. In contrast to the agroindustrial deserts that stretch into the horizon, local food must fit in urban lots and small acreages. Cultivating food can’t simply be about production levels. Of course, Wendell Berry describes this much more eloquently in his book “The Way of Ignorance.”

“The exclusive standard of productivity destroys the formal integrity of a farm just as the exclusive standard of longevity destroys the formal integrity of a life. The quest for higher and higher production on farms leads almost inevitably to specialization, ignoring the natural impulsion toward diversity; specialization in turn obliterates local properties of scale and proportion and obscures any sense of human connection. Driven by fashion, debt, and bad science, the desire for more overrides completely the idea of a home or a home place or a home economy or a home community…The result, inevitably, is ugliness, violence and waste.”

Thanks for choosing to use the local market through ALFN.

Kyle Holton
Program & Market Manager