September 2010 Archives

Dear Shoppers: We continue to see great crowds at most of our markets, and we thank all of you for keeping us alive these last few months of the summer season markets. And let this be the official announcement that the Fairfax Corner, Oakton and Gainesville markets will all be year-round markets — as will the new George Mason University market with time off when the students are not on campus. Our weekend markets will be open every weekend up until Christmas except for the weekend following Thanksgiving. We have been closed that weekend in the past, but we would be happy if shoppers shared their thoughts about that idea. We will then schedule some days off in the coldest months, especially since we will be blessed once again with an indoor location at Fairfax Corner. It will not be terribly inconvenient for any of you who really can’t wait another week for Tommy V’s salsa!

I have been thinking this week about the start of a new school year and what it means for our children’s food options for the next nine months. I have noticed some items at the markets that can really help if you want to send a good lunch to school with your kids and have a variety of healthy alternatives awaiting them when they get home in the afternoon.

Today I asked John Panas, owner of Bonjour La Parisienne bakery, whether he would bring each week the small ciabatta squares that he had with him. And he indicated that he would. Maureen Becker, our awesome market manager at Reston, buys several packages of them at a time when they are available. They are the perfect canvas for paninis — or for any sandwich — and they can be kept in the freezer and removed one by one, providing a permanent supply in no danger of molding or drying out before they are eaten. You can also buy Bonjour La Parisienne’s sourdough, whole wheat, rye and pumpernickel breads already sliced for the convenience of whoever makes the lunches in your house. Great Harvest is also looking after you and the kids with great loaves with all kinds of added ingredients that children love. In some cases the bread alone is a wholesome snack!

And of course the apples were made for lunching and snacking, and that good ole Healthy Homemade Applesauce can also be made in large quantities, frozen in small ones and used as ice packs in lunch boxes for a slushy treat at lunchtime. Hint: I always sprinkle a little cinnamon on each small quantity before it goes into the freezer.

Moving around the market today, I was also reminded as we see the tomatoes fading into fall that my mother wanted us to have the complete sandwich every day, so she faithfully and delicately wrapped our tomato slices in waxed paper (no baggies then!) for us to add when we sat down to lunch. This was to save us from a soggy mess. What I also remembered was that usually — no matter what else was on the sandwich, ham or bologna or chicken — my younger sister would remove the meat, leave the tomato slices untouched and eat it as a mayonnaise sandwich, bringing all the other uneaten items home with her nearly every day. My mother never gave up; my sister didn’t either. Of course, my sister was in heaven at the drive-in in Cordele, Georgia, where for the first time in my life at six years old I tasted mayonnaise on a hamburger. I hated it then, but I like it now when I make it myself and have that great lettuce and tomato on it too.

Still moving across the market, I noticed the variety of cheeses we have at the market — all of which are great candidates for sandwich fixins. We have spreadable goat cheeses and cream cheese mixed with all kinds of good stuff, and Mennonite swiss and cheddar cheese with lots of good things added to them too such as herbs and spices and hot peppers.

We have meats that you can broil or grill on the weekend and slice for sandwiches all week long — brisket and flank steak from Angelic Beef and Croftburn Farm, sausages from Simply Sausage, and cured meats from Lothar Erbe, as well as Heritage Farm and Walnut Hill chickens for chicken salad.

And of course we must have cookies — no harm in a sweet ending to a healthy lunch. Mountain Creek sells wonderful cookies and cake slices, and we soon hope to have Mountain Top cookies at more of our markets. But if it is your preference, this is where that applesauce could also satisfy a sweet tooth with no added sugar at all.

And then we have Borekg’s hummus and dips and salads and Mabelle-Dalmasso’s empanadas and Tommy V’s salsa — all good ideas for lunch or an afternoon snack — all healthy and local too!

So you really have no excuse for not being able to adhere to your principles: You can Buy Fresh and Buy Local for your kids too. For at least some of those lunchbox meals, you can feel really good about what you send with them. Let’s just hope you don’t get most of the sandwich back as a token of their appreciation when they come bounding in the door hungry for a snack! Now there’s a challenge for the intrepid recycler!

See you at the market!

Dear Shoppers: I read lots of good stuff about farming and farmers’ markets all the time. But I also read three newspapers and many, many books every year, some of which are written by the big names in our business, such as Michael Pollan, Bill McKibben and of course our very own Joel Saladin. The points of view are varied, of course, from the worldwide view to our own national food system narrowing to how we eat at home and school. There is always a thread that runs through these writings, and the basic point is that we can make a difference. I believe that myself and know from my own experience that small lifestyle changes can lead to bigger impacts on a system, but it takes leadership, not just exhortation, and it takes a plan, not just rhetoric.

I read three newspaper articles over the last few weeks that made it pretty clear that there is not yet a plan that connects what we can do ourselves to the larger picture. And the participants in the larger scheme of things are not even aware that those of us on the ground — and working with the earth — are committed to and busy about affecting change in that scheme. That scheme includes the ever-consolidating commercial farm industry in this country, which has been nurtured by many years of farm policies that reward size and foster the creation of foods such as plant-based oils used for deep-fat frying in fast food joints all over the world. These oils contribute to our demise rather than our good health.

In an Aug. 22 article in the New York Times Business section, Natasha Singer focused on “Fixing a World that Fosters Fat,” with the challenge being to change the environment, not just our personal behavior. There are indeed academics who are “proposing large-scale changes to food pricing, advertising and availability, all in the hope of creating an environment conducive to healthier diet and exercise choices.” These specialists in the behavior sciences as well as the health and environmental sciences are looking at the connections between personal decisions and the environment in which they are made. And they are “grappling with how to fix systems that are the root causes of obesity.”

So someone is working on this for us. I am sure I will be seeing more articles, and there will be numerous papers presented at national and international symposiums that propose new systems for changing the environment in which we make our food choices. But we still need leaders to accept that these are systems that need to be changed and to talk about them in public, not just write about them in private. The three authors I mentioned earlier are three of those who are willing to speak out, but I am thinking we need to work at the local level to encourage our elected officials who are closest to the consumers to begin talking about these things too. This is our health, our environment and our economy that are out of whack, and if we are waiting for the federal government, big business or academia to initiate the changes we need to see in our own communities, another 40 years will pass, and what will we be eating then?

More on the ways we effect local change later.

See you at the market!

Dear Shoppers: I hope you had a great Labor Day weekend and enjoyed the finest stretch of weather we have had all summer! I was on the road all day today where I saw the ravages of the drought on our farmland to the west and north of us. The corn never made it up to an elephant’s eye, and very little of the field corn was still supporting ears; most had already been cleared for feed — much earlier than normal, which of course meant much less feed in the barn too.

I was out driving the countryside with Max Tyson, Sr. on a farm visit which took us from West Virginia through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Max Sr. and Max Jr. farm many acres of land right around their home, but they also lease land from other farmers that is more than an hour away from their homestead. From one farmer they lease land for vegetables of all kinds and from another their land is part of a massive orchard where most of their apples and peaches and other tree fruit is grown. Max Jr. and his buddies who help him at the markets were in Pennsylvania pruning back apple trees so that the sun could get to the apples, and picking too for this week’s markets.

Even with help, farmers are always farming. Even on Mondays, which is normally their day off from markets, they are in the fields all day long. In season, farmers never have a day off for any R&R and certainly not for a vacation. And at this time of year they are still planting if they hope to bring some new crops to the winter markets. It really never ends for them.

The Tysons are hoping to dig a new well for irrigation this winter. They will have fencing to repair somewhere, and there are always new trees to be planted to replace the ones that have passed their prime. One of the many interesting things I learned was that an apple tree can produce for thirty years, which seems impossible when you see the stress put on them by a full crop of apples hanging from their boughs and bending the trees over to scrape the ground. The prime years for peach production are from about 6–12 years of age, so someone is always planting peach trees.

Another truly amazin’ thing was to see the orchards in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania that stretch for acres and to remember seeing the same thing on the flatlands of south Georgia where I lived for a few years as a child. I never thought I would taste peaches like we ate there; Cordele called itself the Watermelon Capital of the World, but they grew lots of peaches and pecans there too. They were really good — and very fuzzy. But somehow, these farmers discovered that you can grow peaches that are just that good here in the mid-Atlantic on gently rolling hills that catch the afternoon sun, and the fruit ripen to a perfect-peach sweetness close enough to provide us with that great first bite of the summer — and surprisingly, into the early fall. The last peaches of the season are still on the trees in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. And they’re no longer fuzzy either.

At the end of the day, I was glad I had risked my life driving around with Max Sr. — it is a wonder that his truck has lived long enough to have 250,000 miles on it with Max behind its wheel. But I made it home safe and sound and even more aware of why we celebrate Labor Day in this country. These guys work very hard all their lives to feed us the best food we are going to eat all year long — and they love it. Max Jr. went to college to become a computer geek of some kind and came back to farming, where he hardly even looks at his e-mail anymore! And you’re not gonna find me calling him a fool — he is doing what he was born to do. We should all be so lucky.

See you at the market!

Smart Markets returned to the campus of George Mason University last week. To commemorate the occasion, Connect2Mason created this brief video tour of the market. Check it out!