Farmers Market of the people

I've been trained on a 21st century New England farmers market model. A good market has 10 or 15 vendors selling fruits and vegetables, meat, bread, jams, eggs, maybe a few stalls with handicrafts. The food is local, dirty, as cheap as the supermarket and cheaper when different crops are at their peak. It is fresh, ripe, delicious. Signs are handcrafted. Staff are young and idealistic, sometimes dirty from farming. They got up early to pack and leave the farm to come to the market, 5 miles away, or 45. Some stalls are organic, or if not, the farmer can tell me what they do or do not use on the fields, why they are basically organic but haven't applied for the designation because their fields are small or oblong and too close to a non-organic operation next door or about something called Integrated Pest Management which sounds satisfyingly science-y and earthy. The foods change with the season, from peas through kale to tomatoes and squash. They inspire looking up and reinventing historic recipes, eating with the seasons, figuring out what exactly, if anything, can be done with kohlrabi.

Santa Monica isn't like that. The food looks great, tastes great, comes is great variety, subspecies of plums and citrus and cucumbers that I've never heard of before. But it is a business venture first and foremost. The staff under the tents are employees of the farm, and in most cases don't work on the farm. Some have never visited the farm. Farm in California tends to mean an agribusiness-scale operation, dozens or hundreds of acres, migrant labor, monied landholding interests, and always always irrigation with federally and state subsidized water. The staff have information about its location, and maybe its farming practices, but are more focused on the person next to me actually trying to buy something than chatting overly much. Some are young and cheerful and idealistic, at least until their next audition. Many are just working their job. The food is around the same price as the supermarket and there's a sinking feeling these are the same avocados as find their way into groceries across the country. Every week there are tomatoes, oranges, greens of all sorts, beans, celery, onions, pecans, peaches, sprouts, carrots, jujubes, dates, olives, persian, english, and japanese cucumbers, and tomatoes, lots and lots of varieties of tomatoes. There is a big Saturday market, and a big Wednesday market, and within a few miles there are markets on Thursdays and Sundays. The food comes from the far reaches of Los Angeles County, from Ventura, peaches from the desert and apples from San Diego. There is a minor scandal running through the LA Times about surreptitious reselling of commodity wholesale produce. The markets are packed, successful, profitable, filled with cheerful Santa Monicans seeing each other, passing by tourists goggling over the beauty of the food, generally ignoring the couple homeless beggars and buskers camped out in the central plaza of a market that spills out onto six blocks of traffic-free streets. Like so much of Southern California, it feels more transactional than relational, as if that's how people want it.

Yesterday's walk destination: Hillside Woods

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: spikey biscuits
lunch: bagel and lox
dinner: turkey and gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry bread, green beans, salad, superb chocolate cookies, pie, fruit salad, ice cream, coffee