The Rise of Farmers Markets

Last night, I watched a recent “CBS News Sunday Morning” program that I had TiVoed about a week ago, and the lead story was on farmer’s markets. According to the treatment they gave the subject, the number of farmers markets in the US has risen by 16% since 2009, up to about 6100 nationwide.

This upsurge was credited to two phenomena: first, a better public understanding of what processed food does to our bodies; and second, a pro-fresh-food push by the USDA along with Michelle Obama’s healthy eating and anti-obesity programs. About the first factor, the reporter commented that many young parents – like me and my wife – are shopping for healthier and fresher foods for their small children to eat and are themselves eating better as a result. The second factor, she explained, has tied food-stamps and WIC programs to farmers markets, even in some cases offering “double dollars” there. They showed one woman buying freshly steamed crabs with her WIC coupons. Delicious!

My wife and I made decisions similar to the ones the show described about five years ago when our first child was born. We had heard about the hormones in milk and meat causing little girls to develop to early – causing them to have greater risks of cancer and other problems later in life – and we chose to buy only organic and/or hormone-free meat, milk and eggs. It has cost us more money but has been worth it, and to this day both kids (two of them now, 5 and 2) have eaten hardly any meat, milk or eggs that aren't organic and hormone-free.

I have to admit that I tried last summer, when I was out of school and home with the kids, to buy all of our produce from local growers, but I failed. I had three goals for the summer: to get back into do-it-myself recycling since our city government has cut our recycling program, to get my composting up to an optimum level, and to buy all of our produce from farmers markets. The first two went really well, and I have changed my habits now where it is an ordinary routine, but the third has been spotty. Where most of the work of the recycling and composting occurs at home, loading up the kids to go shopping is not as easy. Also, the kids tended to want to hover around the booths that have cakes and pies, not the booths that had tomatoes and collard greens, which it makes it hard to shop peacefully.

As we enter the first days of fall soon, we’re still buying some of our produce from farmers markets, when we can get there on Saturdays, but we’re all long way from buying all of it there. We’ll just have to keep working at it.