Market Affairs

Picture this if you will. Its relatively early in Farmers' Market land, vendors hailing one another, the quiet bustle and occasional slam-bang of setup still emanating from partially outfitted stalls. A trio of would-be customers shuffles passed, and in the little part of your brain that was indoctrinated by the place you lived, not the people who raised you, scoffs at those obviously well-to-do folks. Their expensive cameras dangling, detachable lens giving off the slick aura of the several hundreds of dollars they're worth. And the redneck that pops up in your brain every once in a while wonders what the hell these people are doing here, in front of your stall at 7 in the morning, with no apparent intent to buy anything, just gawking at the local yokels. I may be overstating it a bit.

The icing on this particular cake, the punchline of this joke comes from one of the men, who you overhear tell his companions with a knowledgeable air "Yeah, agriculture is really popular in this area." Popular. Like a fad just passing through, not over one hundred years of the tedious, backbreaking work that this 'agriculture' business truly is. Even the meth-heads probably know that ag is the prevailing economy of this region... And Rachel and I try not to set off in hysterical laughter at the expense of these unknowing perpetrators of idiocy. Sorry mister, but what the heck did you think all those miles of trees were for?

As with any customer service job, you get all temperaments, intelligence, shapes and sizes passing through farmers' market on an average day. A little boy animatedly informs us that his brother (sporting a vividly colored arm cast) broke his arm by tripping on this vociferous sibling. An older gentleman upon overhearing this in turn informs the broken-arm-boy that sometimes they just chop them (broken arms that is) off! That's what they did to him, because he used to have three arms. The mother laughs while wrangling her children.

People call grapes blueberries, figs are unfathomable and questionable sources of sustenance, and the signs dictating price and variety live a largely ignored existence. Its inexplicable to me how very little so many people pay attention. They ask why two baskets are differently priced, willfully oblivious that one is twice the size of the other. 

But lets just have a lesson on figs for a moment. I love figs. I cannot say I love picking them, and here's why. Fig trees produce latex. Now lots of plants do this, but the latex produced by fig trees is especially harsh, inducing rash if in contact with tender skin, like that of your neck and wrists. Latex is released when the tree is wounded... so if you pick the fruit, you wound the tree, and latex flows in copious abundance, especially if the fruit is under-ripe. The other odd thing about figs, which I find fascinating but you may simply find... weird, is that the flowers of a fig are inside the fruit. Fig wasps of the family Agaonidae complete their reproductive cycles using figs. The females, having mated with males in their 'home' fig, then search out another immature fruit in which to lay their eggs. The females either actively or passively pollinate the flowers within the fig, lay their eggs, and the cycles continues. Young mature in galls (remember galls?) within the fig, mate, escape the fig, find a new one...The figs ripen after the wasps have exited the premises, its quite a neat system.  I don't think this really applies to commercial varieties which tend to be parthenocarpic, meaning they bear unfertilized fruit (think seedless watermelon). So don't worry, you aren't consuming dead male wasps in your tasty figs. 

What it ultimately comes down to is that people don't know their fruit, or really their food for that matter. This is a wild generalization, I'm aware. But this is the Central Valley, the backbone rooted (literally) in an industry of food that even its own denizens can't seem to identify.
This fuzzy one is a peach. The smooth one that looks like a peach, that's a nectarine. Plums, tomatoes, disbelief that a summer squash is what it is because it doesn't look a thing like zucchini; and no, organic farming is not just 'spraying in the nighttime'.






Then there are the other customers. Those who know variety by name, and come down week after week to ask after their favorite grapes, peaches, what have you. They gladly pay for the food, appreciate the hard work that goes into this fresh food production enterprise. Sometimes they bring down bits and bobs they've made with our produce, jams, chutneys, scones, little tokens of appreciation. And therein lies the heart of the farmers' market community. The connection between the origin of food and the consumer.