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. 

CSA Week 2 :: Strategizing the Box

So we're in week 2 of the Prince George-Norwich Meadows CSA, which at this point has had two major components :: one, a lot of salad greens, and two, a lot of garlic scapes. This has proven useful, as it's given me the chance to make large sums of salsa verde, as done in Tamar Adlers delightful book The Everlasting Meal. In it, she sort of posits the long-run view of looking at both food shopping and cooking; namely, that doing one-off meals ain't the most efficient thing, but making some parts of a meal turn into the next can  be both rewarding and useful. 

This is especially true with the CSA. Since I'm doing a split with a friend, there's never much of the larger items -- like kohlrabi or turnips -- to do anything more substantial than either (a) nosh on them or (b) place them in the context of a larger dish. We did that last week, turning scapes, salad greens, and onion tops into a salsa verde that has graced eggs, toast, and soon to be a marinade; this week has become stew, with garlic greens, scapes, turnips + turnip greens and kale all being put together into a stew that'll last well into the coming weeks.Ultimately, you're asked to look at the box, look at your pantry, see what works, and add a few residuals to make up the difference...or innovate, as the cases calls for. 

I don't mind this kind of batching -- it sort of forces one to both think creatively and plan a little ahead in the cookery category -- as it makes for meals not just for now, but later too. And in a NYC kitchen, sometimes you don't wanna come home and cook, just get something out of the freezer and nuke it. 

The Recipes

Salsa verde is pretty straightfoward, as its simply about taking a lot of green items -- bitter salad greens, cilantro, mint, basil, chiles -- and blending them together with lemon juice (to keep the color) oil (preferably olive oil) and sometimes chile or nuts (which effectively would make it a pesto of sorts), until you have a smooth-ish paste or sauce. A personal favorite is a 3-2-1 method, using those proportions of salad greens, cilantro, and the garlic scapes, mixed with oil until a thick soupy consistency was wrought, and added a small handful of dried chiles de tepin for some kick and sea salt to season. 

The stew came from a a basic method: browning meat (in this case, chuck beef), adding succulents (the garlic stems and onions), waiting till they get translucent, then adding beans (Mackay beans) and their fluid, crushed tomatoes, chiles de arbol, and then all the greens, plus some of my chicken stalk for good measure. Seasoning is along the lines of a huntsman stew, so cinnamon, nutmeg, and black pepper for good measure. It's still bubbling away as we speak. 

Community Suppported Agriculture

So this year is the first time I have ever joined a community-supported agriculture (CSA) scheme. For those unfamiliar, CSA's are basically a pay-it-forward way of farmers and consumers coming together in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Members pay for the duration of a season up front (sometimes a few months, sometimes year round; in our case, it runs approximately 20 weeks, and we started early), and in return, they get a weekly collection of fruits, vegetables, and whatever other accoutrements the farm might specialize in (some CSA's offer wool shares from sheep, others feature bread-shares and coffee shares from local bakeries and roasters). This gives the farmer the advantage of having capital up-front that can be used throughout the season for improvements and other projects; it also acts as a form of insurance, in the event of crop loss. Customers get a good end insofar as the rate for CSA's tends to run lower than the price of buying a la carte from the farmers markets, and usually they share in bounty -- if it's a particularly good year, they can obtain more product, and in bad years, sometimes less. That is the trade of the CSA -- customers are paying it forward in the hopes of supporting a farmers work. But farmers cannot control nature, and if Mother Nature chooses not to cooperate, the farmer can get hurt -- even get put out of the game by a single bad season. CSA's work to reduce that harm by giving farmers a certain degree of financial security, and the ability to install improvements that can even prevent or reduce environmental damage to crops. 

This might leave one wondering what this means for customers, as they appear to be getting the raw end of what could be a very short stick. The key to remember is that a CSA is, at its core, an investment in community and in a series of practices. When you shop at a supermarket, your income goes towards reinforcing and paying for a series of agricultural and labor practices, processing and commercial practices you might not actually agree with. Your purchases pay companies whose profit motive, largely, takes income out of your state, your local economy, and puts it back into a series of investments that may support projects you do not agree with (remember our chat last week about multiplier effects). CSA's turn that on its head, the community supporting the farmer and acknowledging that they are investing in him to do what he does best -- ostensibly the very things that the community of consumers themselves want.

Sometimes the community becomes more than just consumers, but actual co-producers; some CSA's have volunteer days and hours, optional and required, as part of the membership. Sometimes value-added activities, like making jam with overstock fruit or participating in barn-raising parties, become part of the involvement. In this case, community supported agriculture becomes about more than just procuring produce or investments, it is actually a community-generating relationship, bringing together people around shared values, convivia, and perhaps even the organizing around shared issues that all parties might not have been aware of before. All this, plus the money kept in the community by placing their money in a nearby farm, all have positive consequences on and for the community, writ-large. 

We paid $390 for ~20 weeks of produce -- about 20/week, give or take, that also includes a weekly dozen eggs, and a weekly batch of fruit (not delivered in the first drop, sadly). One pound of lettuces, some kohlrabi, a half bound of chard, a bunch of radishes, a head of lettuce, a couple heads of garlic & stalks, and a pound of garlic scapes plus eggs came in the first batch. Not a bad sell for the season. I'll be updating periodically with the stories about this adventure, as well as raising questions about it to boot. Later this month, I'll be delivering a paper on CSA's for The Association for the Study of Food and Society conference, detailing some of the demographic points and reasons people participate in them.

If any readers are members of CSA's or curious about them, we'd actually be interested in hearing about it. Drop a line in the comment box if you have been, are in, dropped out of, or are curious about CSA's. We'd look forward to hearing about it (especially cases where you dropped out of one). For those interested in checking one out near their home, check out the Local Harvest website here. It's a bit late to start a season, but it shouldn't stop you from investigating a CSA, or other options for local foods in your community.