Farmer's Market

We go to the local farmer’s market on a regular basis. We have gotten away from the canned and processed foods that you find in the supermarket. I don’t really know how much of the food at the farmer’s market is organic or pesticide free or is non-gmo or whatever. I don’t really care either. I think most of the talk about that stuff is mostly bs to scare us into submission. I presume that because of the trend in healthy eating that most of the food at the farmer’s market fits within the guidelines of organic.

The fact of the matter for me is that fresh local food tastes better and I pay a local person for his product rather than some nameless corporation. The Mrs cans some of the food herself. Some of it we freeze. Most of it just gets eaten during the week.

As we try to live smaller we have figured out that life has a lot of middlemen in it. The farmer grows his produce. He sells it to a wholesaler. The wholesaler in turns sells it to some big canning company. The big canning company sells it to another wholesaler and that wholesaler sells it to the corporation that owns the store that you buy it in. This is the process at a minimum. It could be a lot worse than that, I suppose. Every one of these people gets their little cut of the pie which drives up the cost for the you the end consumer.

We not only have the cost consideration but we have the time consideration. There is no telling how long it takes to get from the ground to your table in that process. Most of the food is picked before it is ready and is forced to ripen through some chemical process and shipped hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from the farm to your plate. One time we purchased apples grown in South Africa, a distance of more than 9,000 miles to my house! Yeah, I bet that was healthy food to eat and more importantly than that how many starving Africans are there?

All the farmers selling their wares at my local market farm within 100 miles or so of my town. Once in a while you will get some stuff that was picked too early but most of the food was picked within a couple of days of sale and is fully ripened and is all full flavored. This is the biggest concern for me. The food in the grocery store just tastes like plastic. The container the food comes in probably has more flavor than the food.

Most, if not all, of my dealings at the farmer’s market are cash only transactions. The spies in the government and their agents in the banks and corporate stores are not feeding information to anyone else. Our transactions are nameless and traceless. We do not exchange banking information, or addresses, or phone numbers or anything else that might give away anyone’s information. I like that. My business life should be anonymous and private.

All in all the local farmer’s market here is growing. It has more than just worm eaten food. Some folk sell their knick-knacks and homebrewed items. I am not really interested in most of that stuff as the style doesn’t really fit into a minimalist mould but it is cool that it is there for people who want it. We even have local musicians there every week. Many of them sell cds of their music. Some of them are quite good. Of special interest to me is an old man who wrote two books full of stories from his childhood sits there every week in the sun selling his two self-published books. I may have to give him some competition someday.