Rediscovering Taste at the Farmer's Market

Wellness culture made us forget that food is supposed to taste good. Summer can help us remember.

Our small-town farmer’s market is a curious mix of maha moms, eco-conscious liberals, granola farmers, and some second-rate crafters. I love it. There’s always gems for sale there, my favorite local cheesemaker is getting an amazing reputation, and there’s ridiculously fresh local greens grown just 5 or 10 miles from the market. There’s also jewelry probably no one needs, lots of crochet, and people looking for ways to use up and sell stuff made from their overly large stocks of Essential oils.

I run into people I miss and people I don’t. I love that I can cross the street over to the feed store or the hardware store or pick up my library holds. We live in a very charming walkable town. It took people a long time and a lot of work to get this market to happen, and there’s a sense of pride in people fighting for good quality food. It’s a sensory explosion: colors, smells, textures, sounds. Summer wakes up something inside of us, after a spring eating slump, and a winter full of rich comfort foods.

We remember something ancient we all once knew and understood: Food, as it turns out, is supposed to actually taste good. Like for pleasure. In the case of fruits, we still sort of know this. But yes vegetables are supposed to taste good, they are not a punishment. Seeing them displayed at a farmers’ market, still sometimes clinging to dirt, or artistically arranged, by color, by type, under a canopy, while listening to the sweet and sometimes not so sweet street music, it hits something deep inside.

Vegetables were bred, hybridized and prized, for thousands of years – not because any one was aware of their nutritional content or their fiber or their minerals. But because we liked them. 1000 years ago, we had no incentive to eat them just because they were good for us.

My own history with vegetable eating as a child wasn’t always so great. At formal family dinners, round the table would come the ‘vegetable casserole’ a frozen mix of peas, corn, and carrots baked in brown gravy for well, let’s be honest that no amount of time would have made any difference, but for way too long. My parents came out of an era where food safety taught them to ‘boil everything’, and they did. It’s not a bad idea, if there’s a threat of contamination. Modern government experts would probably tell us to do that today with all the E. coli and salmonella, except we aren’t eating peas and beans and corn for dinner: it’s kale, romaine lettuce, and spinach. That would mean boiling our greens into a watery slop that resembles something from my 1980s school lunch plate. Our upcoming generations might be more scared of those boiled greens than E. coli – and I’ll just say I’m scared of both.

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