Farmers Markets as a Gateway Drug

So as mentioned yesterday, I participated two weeks back in the Global Gateways Conference put on by the American Association of Food Studies and the Department of Food Studies at both NYU and New School. A splendid good time, I sat in on sessions regarding supply chain problems, zines & food memorandia, and a particularly fun session about food and protest movements. I also presented on a panel with several other graduate students on the issues facing farmers markets and food regulations. 

My topic specifically was rooted in farmers markets as a civic institution and as a jumping off point for greater engagement with sustainability issues. When we compare coventional agriculture and buying practices, most alternatives are just that, alternative systems that exist in parallel to conventional markets and goods and contain differing value chains. The types of practices and values contained in these systems are not exactly "legible" to people whose behaviors are ingrained or entrenched from conventional systems of agricultural consumption; the social legibility of sustainable agriculture may be one of its greatest hurdles. When we talk about social legibility, we're referencing a concept from landscape architecture, that explains how, simply by looking at a given layout or geography, a person can "read" or intuit how the space is supposed to be approached (a key example is how we learn to utilize jungle gyms -- that's a form of legibility). Social legibility takes this concept and applies it to how we understand and interact with social norms and behaviors -- like how we learn or elect to shop in certain ways, or participate in more abstracted forms of values-based actions. 

Case in point: community-supported agriculture (CSA). While there are many ways they are executed, the fundamental idea of how a CSA operates -- paying for an entire season of products before you actually receive them, possibly losing out if the season goes poorly -- requires a way of rethinking how we engage with food procurement. You have to understand that it is not a classic transaction of payment for goods. That requires a degree of understanding -- both intellectual as well as emphatic -- of how the system works and why you choose to participate in it. 

Long story short: farmers markets act as an endlessly modifiable medium by which people can interact with, purchase, and learn from farmers directly and indirectly. They meet people within their communities. They are, by most margins, accessible in terms of placement, interactivity, and monetary access. They can be moved or placed in spaces where food access is an issue, and modified in terms of the types of programs on offer (like WIC/SNAP benefits, "double-benefit" programs like those offered by Wholesome Wave, or registration drives) unlike brick and mortar institutions or private markets. They are also the most legible of form of alternative agricultural consumption, short of growing your own (small or large scale), and by our reckoning, are the perfect space by which to introduce coventional consumers to alternative agricultural models (for the reasons listed above as much as the fact that farmers markets are as close to the conventional shopping practice). 

Our premise: farmers markets lead people into activities like gardening, CSA's, growshares, or other types of alternative agricultural consumption and assists with increasing peoples agency and values where alternative agriculture is concerned. We examined CSA members and their participaton in farmers markets, and gave them blank response sites to tell us in their minds what linked the two together. (We hoped to avoid leading answers that might've influenced their answers, or made for selecting every single answer). 

 The study is still ongoing but our research proved this much (with over 150 samples from across the country): farmers markets do act as stepping stones to deepening or initiating the values of alternative and sustainable agriculture, as well as deepening participation in them. Of the surveys, 2/3 actively & explicitly identified the farmers market as a place where they met and interacted with farmers, learned about their practices and day-to-day, and led them to take a leap in participating in CSA's. While farmers markets  were rarely the place people learned about their CSA (that happened largely by word of mouth at a number of different institutions), the values were put in place through peoples participating in the farmers market environment. There's more geekery to be found in the data -- like the regional and gender distinctions in the surveys -- but this is the core of the research question.

And the significance of this outcome: namely that in understanding this implicit role that farmers markets can occupy, we have a stepping stone for not only increasing the resilience of local agricultural systems (by educating through participation in farmers markets) but also because farmers markets can act as the nodes and conduits by which greater interactivity -- a dialogue -- between conventional and alternative agricultural systems can exist to the benefit of local agricultural systems. If bringing in people from across experiences, ethnicities and economic categories can increase participation in -- and more importantly, explicit understanding of -- alternative agricultural systems, then there is a strong policy recommendation to be made in supporting farmers markets writ large. And that has a number of implications for everyone.