Farmers markets: An antidote to processed life

Sometimes I just get so tired of the things I do all the time. Changing lanes. Signing up for things on the internet. Closing my windows when the industrial-strength lawn machines start up. Trying to remember my stupid, stupid password. Thinking retail therapy at TJ Maxx is going to make me feel better. Walking the loooong aisles of the grocery store, going past hundreds of feet of high fructose corn syrup-sweetened fizzy water and cereals inspired by candy. 

Fortunately there are antidotes to conformity and the virtual. Like the farmers market. That’s retail therapy that actually works. A farmers market offers something real, made by human hands. Each thing I buy there has a connection I can feel: to the soil, to our region and to the hard-working people who plant, nurture, harvest and lug their food to me.

I go to the farmers market all year: there are several winter markets, and you’d be surprised at what great stuff you can find when there’s snow on the ground, from bread and eggs to greens, apples and root vegetables. 

But now it’s late spring, every farmers market is up and running, and the bounty is coming in. So get yourself to one. If my purely emotional recommendation isn’t enough to get you there, let me give you some more rational arguments. Oh, and if your first reaction is “local food is too expensive,” I hear you and I’ll get to that. 

Food grown by farmers within an hour of two of the many local markets tastes better. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever eaten a grocery store tomato and a homegrown one. No varieties at the farmers market were bred for transportation. They are fresher, more vibrant, more alive, and I know spinach doesn’t get healthier as it travels here from California. 

The quality of the food, along with treating myself to a cup of coffee and an almond croissant and getting a chance to visit with the farmers I’ve become friends with, is what keeps me going on Sunday mornings. But my bedrock motivation is something else that motivates many of the market operators, vendors and customers. It’s a commitment to certain systems-changing principles that feel like resistance. 

The way food is produced in this country has some deep flaws. This column is nowhere near long enough to explain them all. But the crux of the critique is that agriculture, which is based on natural systems, has had an industrial system imposed on it for the sake of efficiency. For example: huge fields of one crop, which leads to the need for pesticides and herbicides; mechanization, which leads to farmers going into debt; and employing fewer people. Feeding animals in huge feedlots, which leads to antibiotic use and excess manure as waste, when once it would have served as fertilizer. Chickens in overcrowded barns. Trucking food long distances. Constant downward pressure on prices. All bad for the environment, animal welfare, rural life and farm labor. 

Plus, federal agriculture policy subsidizes with $30 billion a year the cultivation of specific commodity crops like corn and soy, which are used to make cheap, highly processed food. Or which are exported for animal feed, while we import human food from other countries. Subsidies also encourage planting even marginal land instead of leaving it in a natural state. Just one more thing about agriculture that contributes unnecessarily to climate change. 

The sweetened breakfast cereal and the soda pop are on the federal dole. The unsubsidized broccoli, the walnuts, the fish are self-sufficient. And local food is even freer from the bigger system. Especially since even the paltry amount of federal dollars to help build markets and local systems are being taken away. 

So, yes, local food costs more. It reflects the actual cost of raising the food. (Though you’ll find that local eggs are quite competitive right now.) Sometimes people call local food elitist, but I think regular food is what’s elitist because it makes unhealthy, processed food cheap and healthy food expensive. Also, it is cheap on the back of taxpayers, the health of the environment and the climate, farmers and farm laborers and animals. I feel like I’m buying a different product when I get cauliflower or ground beef from a local farmer than the grocery store version, and I choose to pay the price without even thinking about it. It’s a luxury perhaps, but the opposite of a guilty pleasure. 

If you can’t afford it you can’t afford it, and everyone has a time and money budget I wouldn’t presume to dictate. But at least don’t think farmers are gouging you. They are not getting rich, they’re trying to do something good. There will come a day when their expertise in how to grow food sustainably will save us. 

But maybe go this summer and try the things that are the most better than the grocery store. Indiana melons. Heirloom tomatoes with the perfect balance of sweet and tart and laden with mysterious umami. Peaches you have to eat over a sink. Fresh local non-Chinese garlic, plump and pungent in its paper skin. Bibb lettuce cut this morning. 

The flavor is the advertisement. The product is supporting a better way to do things.

Polly Campbell covered restaurants and food for the Cincinnati Enquirer from 1996 until 2020. She lives in Pleasant Ridge with her husband, and since retiring does a lot of reading, cooking and gardening, if that’s what you call pulling weeds. She writes monthly on a variety of topics, and she welcomes your feedback and column suggestions at editor (at) moversmakers.org.