Farmer's Market

This morning we visited a local farmer's market. I've wanted to visit one before, but I thought the only one close to us was one that was only open on Sundays from 9:00-1:00, which obviously doesn't work for us. My friend Christine told us about this one, which is on Wednesday mornings. We bought some pears, apples, and peaches, as well as a few zucchini because Nathan has had a hankering for zucchini bread. Then we walked around the farm where the market is held. It's a restored farm that does programs for kids and whatnot. Anna and Grace really enjoyed seeing the cows, horses, goats, pigs, sheep, chickens, and turkeys.

The main reason I've been interested in visiting a farmer's market lately is the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barabra Kingsolver. I started reading it while we were at White Sulphur Springs, and I finally got aorund to finishing it a few days ago. It was fascinating! I know Barbara and I would not have much to agree on politically and religiously, and I have read The Poisonwood Bible, which I thought was well-written, but I disliked. But I learned a lot from this book, and it has made me think a lot about food, particularly where it comes from.

Kingsolver's family moves from Arizona to a small farm they own in southwestern Virginia at the beginning of the book. Their goal is to be able to for a year only buy and eat foods that they can obtain locally, with just a few exceptions, such as organic wheat for them to make bread (they couldn't find a local source), and coffee (they only bought fair trade coffee, of course). She begins telling their year's experiences in late March, as asparagus is coming up.

Kingsolver describes a osrt of all-purpose plant to give people a feel for what should be in season during a year. First, the shoots come up in spring, with small leaves, then bigger leaves (spinach, lettuce, etc.). Then lower buds come, and after that small green fruit (cabbage, romaine, broccoli). The fruits grow larger and riper as the days get hotter in midsummer (baby squash, cucumbers, green beans, green peppers, tomatoes, which lead to more mature fruits like beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, red peppers). These matur into hard-shelled fruit with a lot of seeds inside (cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins, winter squash). As the days grow cool again, the plant hoards sugars the leaves have made into some sort of storage unit (carrots, onions, etc.). She says that people used to know what things would be in season at any given time, but now people are so used to seeing everything in a store at any given time that no one knows what things are naturally growing around them at any one time.

To get foods here so out of season takes an immense amount of fuel and refrigeration, and in the process many nutrients are lost. In fact, she talks about how everyone wants so desperately to like vegetables and eat more of them, but they're all being bred to be hardy and stand up to long waiting times before being cooked and eaten, so most flavor is being bred right out of them! Also, by only buying things from big farming conglommerates, we have lost a ton of species of all these fruits and vegetables. I was struck by her description of the many varieties of potatoes (what a boring vegetable) they grew themselves, including a "Peruvian Blue" potato variety that actually has blue insides, having the same antioxident that blueberries have! I certainly have never even heard of that before! In fact, I learned alot about how all manner of fruits and vegetables grow, and it was very eye-opening to read about genetically-modified vegetables, which don't have genetic variety. We could be heading towards an "Irish potato famine" of our own, since we rely so much on basically a few strains of soybean and corn. Interesting.

It all made me want to go buy a few acres somewhere and start a huge garden (where the boys could earn their keep, LOL) and raise chickens. Oh wait--I can't stand birds. I do like the idea of fresh eggs though. Kingsolver's younger daughter did raise chickens and had a booming egg business. Thye also raised turkeys, although not the dumb ones with huge white breasts, like we eat for Thanksgiving. The funniest chapter in the book is the one where she tries to get her turkeys to mate because good mating and mothering behavior has basically been bred out of turkeys nowdays. Everything is artificially done.

I did have some bones to pick with her. First of all, she assumes that anyone who does not believe in macroevolution (evolution across species--ape to humans, for example), must not believe in easily demonstrated microevolution (evolution within a speices--natural selection). She makes several snide comments about this through out the book, which was irritating because it is so not true.

Also, she believes that the reason most people don't buy healthier organic and especially locally grown food is because it's more expensive, but these same people are wasting money all over the place on frivolous things like bottled water and name brand clothing. Well, that is not us. We buy cheap food AND use tap water, shop at second-hand stores, listen to the radio (instead of iPods), take vacations to visit family, borrow books from the library, etc., etc., etc. Of course, she only has 2 daughters to raise (and the older one goes off to college during the time of the book), and both she and her husband work (he is a professor at a college). Different family priorities.

In fact, a lot of what they eat during this year just wouldn't work, or would be a lot harder to deal with, if they had even one boy, much less a family of lots of kids. At the end of some chapters, the older daughter , Camille, writes a bit about something, and she also shares a week of typical dinners for that particular season. Many of these ideas really wouldn't cut it for a bunch of boys. Here is an example from May:

grilled chicken, bread, salad
asparagus and moral bread pudding
Asian summer rolls and rice
vegetarian tacos with refried beans
cheese ravioli tossed with stir-fried vegetables
chicken pizza
vegetable and cheese frittata, salad, strawberry-rhubard crisp

See, there's just not that much there for each meal, and you'd have to really have a ton of say, asparagus, to make a pudding that would feed a family of 10 (well, maybe not MY family, which I think would go hungry before touching asparagus and morel bread pudding, LOL). But I'm just saying . . . She's definitely writing to the small family, especially one with all girls.

But overall, I really enjoyed the book, and when I saw asparagus being advertised in our local grocery circular today, I wondered where that would have been flown in from, since it only comes up in spring around here. Hmmm. Kingslover had a funny section where she talked about her dislike for the local food writer in her paper. He would talk about pumpkins, but all his recipes would call for cans of pumpkin, and he would talk about things like making fresh pesto in the middle of winter, when the basil certainly wasn't fresh and ready to be crushed into pesto! Poor guy--he didn't realize he was writing to such an expert!

There are a lot of things I can't change--we live in an expensive area, with hardly any yard, and we have a big family. I'll keep buying most stuff from the commissary, and that's just the way it is. But I do feel more aware of what things we should be eating when, and I am planning on visiting the farmer's market regularly to support these (somewhat, LOL) local farmers. We can at least branch out in our vegetable choices and eat more really fresh ones, even if we can't grow much more than tomatoes ourselves.