I have a lot of favorite summer events: Ketch'em Alive, the Sawtooth Music Festival, spending time on the lakes, the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, and without a doubt, the weekly farmers' markets. As our wintry and cold climate takes a brief respite, the opportunity to indulge in the colors, smells and tastes of regionally grown foods on a weekly basis is one not to be missed.
Farmers' markets allow us to eat "authentic" organic food and snack on homemade treats, while supporting the biodiversity of the environment and economy.
The term "authentic" means beyond-organic food that is local, seller-grown and fresh. The term usually refers to products produced within a 150-mile radius of their place of final sale. Also, these growers' fields and greenhouses are open for inspection at any time. The goal is vigorous, healthy crops and livestock endowed with inherent powers of vitality and resistance. This optimizes the whole concept and quality of the way food should be while affecting our health, economy and environment in positive ways.
These farmers operate with a commitment to producing the highest quality food possible, rather than mass production. At the markets we have the chance to meet the people who plant, nourish and harvest our food. That is pretty special. This energy fosters an entirely different relationship to the food we eat from conventional agriculture.
Small, local markets are a welcome contrast to the agribusiness giants that often promote a genetically modified, processed, hybridized food industry based on chemical fertilizers and technology. Buying local food helps farmers thrive and reduces energy consumption. Estimates on how long the average food travels from harvest to plate range from 1,200 to 2,500 miles.
In "Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine," Dr. Gabriel Cousens discusses the decline in our foods due to conventional farming practices.
"Since the 1940s the nutritional content of food has declined each year," he writes. "The USDA periodically publishes data on the nutritional content of food. Wheat, for example, used to average a protein content of 19 percent in the 1940s, but today it averages about 12 percent. The same trend exists for the mineral, vitamin and protein content of fresh fruits and vegetables. There appears to be a strong correlation between the onset and trend of this decline in nutritional content of foods and the introduction of heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, gene manipulation, and other practices of conventional agriculture."
These practices also lead to a decline in soil quality and loss of topsoil and soil fertility. In other words, not only does it degrade our health, but our planet as well.
Authentic growers are committed to supplying food that is fresh, ripe, clean, safe and nourishing. Most importantly, the sterile, commercial, chemically based agribusiness giants simply cannot give me a blackberry that comes close to comparing to the taste, quality and energy as the little burst of sunshine that I bought at a farmers' market, from sweet grandmotherly Luda, who added my bill up on her abacus.
Contact mollypeppo@mac.com for questions, comments, or suggestions.
Molly Peppo
