Reasons to Market #3: Place

I remember many years ago, almost in another life, I had traveled to another city. Not to another country mind you, but far from home. I was excited to be in a different place. To see what another city had to offer. I remember getting off the train and making my way out into the city streets. Once I was there, a car passed by, and out if it’s window blasted the same hit single that I had heard not long before leaving home.

 Hearing the song instantly deflated me. I felt like I had gone nowhere. Or, at least, nowhere special. I had left to see a different place but…was it different? Was the place that I had left even different?

 Here I was, hundreds, maybe a thousand miles from home, and I felt from that song that I had little to show for it. Was my home as homogenized as the place I was arriving to? Maybe this was a little bit of an extreme reaction from this younger me, but that was the feeling. 

 Traveling within these borders over the years to some extent has only reinforced this feeling. The natural world of this country varies wildly with little effort other than the travel itself (and it’s always worth it). But the food, the music, the culture…not nearly so much as it should. Certainly, it can, but you have to get into the good nitty gritty of a place to know what a place REALLY has to offer. You have to get out of what you might know, grill several locals, find one funky place and ask the person working what other funky places they recommend.

 Sure, I’ve stopped in the plains of Nebraska at 9:57pm for a Starbucks coffee because that was the only option for literally hundreds of miles. Heck, you can start a road trip in NYC with a Starbucks Coffee and end it in L.A. with a Starbucks Coffee drinking the same coffee at all your stops all along the way. Likewise, you can eat a big mac in Uptown and rest assured that some bobo is dripping the same ketchup on his pretentious scarf in Paris. I understand why this happens. But damn, we can do so much better.

 Farmers markets are one antidote. They sit in that good nitty gritty. They are worth the effort, as much at home as on the road…but especially at home. Whichever farmers market you attend, you can be sure that no one else in the far flung corners of the world is having the same experience as you. I like that not only are you not going to find any of the vendors at the markets in the Twin Cities anywhere else in the country, but that even within the Twin Cities themselves our customers sometimes choose which market they attend based on what experience they want to have, in that same city, on that same day. And the same goes for if you find yourself in a far flung corner seeking out their local markets. It will be something that you would never experience here. 

 You can be in a place that is unlike another, or go to a place that is unlike another. Let the world eat in lockstep if it must. Farmers markets are a finger print of place.