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The Farmer’s Market rocks!
A big THANK YOU to all the Farmer’s of this province for keeping us city-slickers well fed with delicious farm fresh food!
—A shameless produce addict
This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2009.
9 Comments
I wonder if anyone could really tell the difference between local and imported in a blind taste test. I highly doubt it. A lettuce is a lettuce is a lettuce.
Oh Tim, you’ve never tried a real Heirloom tomato from the valley. Or a loaf of homemade bread from the Menonnite family. Or a pot of borscht made from juicy fall beets!
Compare that to a cardboard beefsteak tomato grown in Chile, packed in China and shipped here via South Africa. You would have to be insensate to miss the difference.
Fresh local veggies are much yummier than Sobey’s crap vegetables. No question.
I agree with Tim. This whole “fresh, local, organic, fair trade, etc.” trend is just a… well, trend. Besides, larger-scale farming operations are usually much more efficient and therefore more environmentally friendly than small-scale operations. A tomato produced en masse with his other billions of tomato buddies in California probably has less of an environmental impact than Farmer Joe’s “Fresh Local Organic” hippy tomato grown on a small farm in the Valley with more units of time, labour, and energy per tomato put into it. It’s all about economics of scale.
This also applies to “free-range chickens” and whatnot. Don’t you think that chickens allowed to be “free-range” would cause more of an environmental impact through their use of a larger land area and more energy required per chicken than chickens force-fed in little chicken coops? They’re all going to die and be eaten anyway.
How can you consider “fresh” to be a trend? I for one intend to continue eating fresh food. As most people do. I wouldn’t say that is a trend.
With regards to your other comments, I guess it all boils down to what you consider to be the goal of farming. If you consider the role of the farmer as a business entity obliged to extract the maximun number of calories from a given piece of land and deliver it to the consumer at the lowest possible cost, then you may be right.
In that case, we should continue the disturbing trend of replacing traditionally diverse farms with industrial corn operations. Then we will feed our children primarily high-fructose corn syrup and wonder why they are all obese and have diabetes at 15.
Or, we could be reasonable and support farmers that bring us a diverse harvest of fruits and vegetables and meat which tastes good and is healthy for us. It may not be maximizing the calorie-per-acre potential of the land, but is that what we really want them to do?
I would say no. I like eating fresh and tasty produce from NS farms. It is better for my health and better for our provincial economy. I’m not sure which system is better in terms of energy balance speculation – but there is something inherently unsettling about buying apples shipped here from the southern tip of Africa when I could just buy the ones grown in Kentville. That’s my 2cents.
I think that quite a few people can pass a taste difference test between Californian grown produce and locally grown and ripened produce. Produce ripened on the vine (or tree) tastes different than produce ripened on the train (or plane). Strawberries, for instance, grown more for handling and traveling capabilities than taste cannot compare to our local traditional varieties. Also, the quality of soil, air and water play into the taste (not to mention the usage of pesticides and such things). Even the plant life that grows alongside the farmers’ fields can contribute to the taste. And, in light of incidences of water contamination found in produce lately, I think I would be better off trusting my local farmers’ water source.
Thank you retailers for keeping your fresh produce prices reasonable. I still can’t afford local.
Have you tried shopping at the Farmer’s Market expatriot? I find it really quite affordable – depending on what you buy. My spouse and I go nearly every saturday and we always take 40.00 cash with us. That usually buys us 2-3 large bags of produce and one meat item (i.e. a couple of sausages, burgers or steaks).
We spend 100 / week on groceries in total with 40.00 of it going to the Farmers Market. All in all that is pretty cost effective for 2 people to live on. It helps that we eat meat only once (or sometimes) twice per week. I think meat is good for you in small quantities but you definately dont need to eat it daily. By doing, so we feel better and spend less.
Some things are expensive at the market, but the produce is really quite affordable.
Sorry, but I CAN tell the difference between VanOostrums steaks and roasts(http://www.valleyselect.ca) and the ones from the Supersobeys. I don’t even know where to buy doubledsmoked bacon, thuringer/lamb/octoberfest bratwurst, schnitzel, and fresh zucchini bread other than at the market. Remember the old days when there used to be butchers? I don’t want to sound like a food snob but theres more boxxed meats at the supersobeys than fresh kill.
Economically speaking, and therefore, in most cases, environmentally speaking as well, it is much more efficient for farmers to grow and focus on one crop on large-scale farms rather than many different crops on smaller-scale farms. Efficiency is environmentally-friendly! Is the first ‘R’ of the three R’s not to ‘reduce’? Therefore, like I said, that genetically modified tomato coming from California may very well be a more sustainable choice than that locally-grown organic tomato from the Valley.
Also, who doesn’t like all the healthy, tasty tropical fruits like bananas, mangoes, pineapples, etc. that we will likely never be able to grow here?