"Plenty"

"Like many people, we had been to farmers' markets occasionally in the past.  Too often they seemed first and foremost to offer shiatsu massage, mantelpiece knickknacks, espresso blends, folk music, face-painting."

Whaaaaat? Those aren't farmers' markets. Where are the farmers?  The places James and Alyssa are describing sound more like craft fairs, folk shows, hippie gatherings.. you know.  Real farmers' markets, like the ones I've been a part of, have strict rules and regulations.  All of the above-mentioned items would soooo not fly at a real market.  Arts and crafts? Nuh-uh.  The stricter markets don't allow anything that isn't an actual off-the-farm product: produce, dairy products, meats, cut flowers, seedlings, eggs, etc.  Even then, there are incredible regulations on which products are acceptable.  Organic standards and buy-in caps or prohibitions are the biggies. It pisses me off to no extent when people come to a FARMERS' market looking for totally not FARM products. Ugh.

"Even certified organic food is no longer wholly trusted; an $11 billion industry, "organic" foods today may include factory-farmed meat and dairy products, and even synthetic additives or artificial flavors.  Organic vegetables are frequently the end products of intensive production methods, and end up on your plate after, say, crossing the continent by diesel truck and passing through a plant that washes 26 million servings of lettuce each week."

The biggest misconception, I think, that people have about eating healthfully is that anything in the supermarket marked "organic" is automatically safe, superior, and good for you.  People who hold up tomatoes from Mexico, shrink-wrapped three to a package, or a box of pasta with 30 ingredients, most of the synthetic preservatives, and triumphantly declare, "Look! They're organic!" don't get it.  Organic almost always means NOTHING unless it is coupled with LOCAL.  The word "organic" is industrial agriculture's latest and biggest marketing ploy.  The USDA realized this in the early 2000s so they quickly decided to regulate the use of the word.  You can literally get sued for all you've got for wrongly using the term "organic."  Sure, small-scale farms can use 100% organic METHODS, treat their animals humanely, abstain from hormone use, and use nothing but all natural ingredients and the like, but if they can't afford to feed their animals USDA certified organic grain, then they cannot market themselves as organic - they can't even casually reassure their loyal customers for fear of getting slapped with a lawsuit.  This is what's going on as big box industries realize they can continue shipping crap in from all over the world, slap an infamous little green and white USDA organic sticker on it, and keep rolling in the dough, made possible by the poor suckers who don't REALLY care about where their food comes from and buy all the trendy new organic products so they can be part of the latest "fads." Disgusting.  And people laugh when I say the USDA is corrupt.

James talks about realizing the "human scale" of a salad he made from a dozen ingredients from a farmers' market.  "I could relate each item not only to its place but to its specific farm and to the faces of those farmers."  I like this because it reminds me of the presentation Russ Libby gave here at COA about a month ago.  His presentation was called "A Place, A Face, A Taste."  He described how you can identify good food - local, sustainable, etc. - by its associations with a place, a face, and a taste.  The place is simple - the geographic component.  Where does you food come from? Do you know where the farm is? Have you been there? Did you buy it directly from the farm, farm stand, or farmer?  Then of course, there is the face - the human component. Do you know the person who grew, raised, or made your food?  Do you know his name, or could you recognize him?  Can you develop a relationship with your food producers, and in turn reconnect to your community?  The third aspect is the taste - the actual nutrition and yummy factor.  Russ gave an example, if I remember correctly, about how a person he talked with went on and on about how sustainable, local food products just taste better.  When you're tasting your food, what do you taste? Bland, sterile food? Chemically altered or manipulated foods?  Or do you taste real flavors, whole and natural?

I remember reading in the book "Kitchen Literacy" about an experience of the author once when she was gathering a variety of greens and vegetables from her garden.  As she placed them on her cutting board in preparation for making her salad, a few little spiders skittered out from amongst her greens.  At first she was taken by surprise and more or less grossed out by these tiny bugs on her food, but then she realized that the spiders were just an affirmation of how fresh her food was.  Living things were literally still inhabiting her food as she plucked it from her garden.  In the end, she was grateful to know how fresh and alive the food was that she grew for herself.  I understand this.  I like dirt on my veggies. I don't think we eat enough dirt as a society.  Just like the bugs, residue of healthy, moist soil on my produce reassures me that my food hasn't been bathed in a serious of chemicals and sterilizers.  It hasn't sweat off the dirt by traveling thousands of miles.  It still retains its mark of the earth.  Dirt is my confirmation of a product's life and vibrance.