We spent the holiday weekend camping with some pals in the western part of the state. It was a swell time. Last week, as we were exchanging frantic emails with each other to make sure we collectively had our gear and, most importantly our food organized, one of our friends suggested someone grab corn at a farmers’ market, for grilling purposes.
We local eaters smugly replied: it’s a little early for corn.
But as we local eaters drove out Route 2 to Route 112 and on the winding roads to our rural destination, we passed several farms and their farmstands offering, yup, corn!
Now, corn, at least as I conceive of it, is a treat reserved for high summer. I have very fond memories of living in the Pioneer Valley, pedaling through the rocking corn fields of Hadley, Mass. in the stiff and slow heat of August. *August.* I mean, I can’t be sure it was August, but it definitely was not the Fourth of July.
But this scenario is, I think — I am going to say it — may be, a casualty of the popularity of the local foods movement. What I mean to say is, local farmers are growing stuff earlier than they used to (and perhaps earlier than they should be) to accommodate a consumer demand for Those Most Precious and Adored local crops. That is what the “local foods movement” is asking them to do.
A couple weeks back we were having a conversation with a farmer at the Cambridgeport market. (She is young and awesome and well-known in the community.) We got to talking about how, thanks to the swell of local eaters and the demand for a steady, nearly year-round supply of local food, what used to feel like a healthy lull in winter now feels like not much of a break at all. She’s got to work harder, in part because the bureaucracy is bigger, in part because her customer base has grown and also, in part, because she’s got to get stuff to seed … earlier than ever before.
Hmph.
Remember the first or second week of the Copley Square market and how a bunch of different growers had hothouse or greenhouse tomatoes? There’s another treat that, at least as I conceive of it, is reserved for high summer. I don’t even think that last year I saw them so early.
Now obviously there are some incentives for the local farmer if local customers will pay a premium for a local tomato on June 1. And hey, it was great for us to have corn on the cob over a fire this July 4th. Maybe there’s nothing at all to complain about here, but perhaps there is something curious worth noting. But a lot of do this local food thing with integrity and a commitment to eating things when we’re supposed to eat them.
Also, this is a position we take often: The movement has got to be about feeding people. I mean everybody, including the people who think they are too poor (and actually are) to shop at farmers markets and the farmer working her butt off all year to actually enable a transformation of our food system. To make that possible — that = sustainability = I am wondering do we need tomatoes in June?
Tags: Rants
I think this year there’s a combination of locavore consumers paying a premium for stuff that is early, and stuff being genuinely early because of weather conditions.
Part of it comes from when you plant it, but the weather got warm enough to move tomato seedlings outside sooner; strawberries were already out in their patches and just ripened sooner, etc. but corn, you’re right - some farmers are definitely needing to plan to plant it earlier. And the first strawberries I bought, at Copley in May, were ripe because of the quasi-greenhouse they were in, and I paid a greedy premium.
I have to wonder, though, whether if it can be done without a lot more growing cost to the farmer it actually will *help* local food get to everyone, eventually. Both because people who are not committed to eating locally *want* corn on the 4th of July, and because having corn that is available ripe for 3 months instead of for a month and a half will get more corn to more people instead of having corn every day in August or plenty of locally-grown corn in the freezer for a few of us.
The reason for eating locally shouldn’t be to pat ourselves on the back for how cool we are for being willing to suffer without tomatoes in January, after all, but to have enough tomatoes for everyone without trucking them all from California.
Well, no one’s holding a gun to the farmers’ head–but since most are living pretty close to the margins, I’d have no argument with creating a supply of high-end stuff that can help finance other projects. (I suppose the argument against this is that devoting what scant humanpower local organic farmers have to providing boutique items is that much less they have to dedicate to staples). It’s tough making a living growing straples like zucchini.
Additionally, folks are going to buy tomatoes–or those, flaccid, goopy, vaguely tomatoey-like pale pink spheres at the supermarket–might as well give (those who can afford them, admittedly) them the choice. Better they get them from RedFire than from Holland or Israel.
But all in all, if we’re actually going to transform the loca movement into something catholic, season-extension techniques are going to be essential. You wouldn’t argue against the home gardener using cold frames so as to be able to eat greens in winter. My own position would be: any use of sustainable technologies (greenhouses, c-frames, etc) is, by and large, a plus.
And we do have to cater, willy nilly, to the spoiled American palate to make this thing take off. Explaining to people that they’ll be subsisting on overwintered Hubbards for three months each year isn’t going to do the trick.
As for that “healthy lull” in winter–having spent a few hours pulling weeds at my CSA today—the soil felt like hot asphalt–I can say that farmers deserve any lull they get get. But–well, maybe they don’t get one (and I have some sense how much time goes in, each winter, to endless planning and ordering–not exactly a lull). But if you’re able to produce all winter, that can add some serious revenue, allowing you to hire more people (who can take over some of the business and planning end of things in January).
But here’s my main point–there the question of what’s “natural” in the first place, what, as you say, “we’re supposed to eat” & when. Tomatoes aren’t indigenous to Massachusetts, and sweet corn didn’t come about via natural selection. So: are we “supposed to be eating” tomatoes in the first place? in other words, at what historical point do we identify something as “natural”–your childhood, when sweet corn wasn’t available ’til August? (I think that’s the barometer many of us use!) Or two hundred years earlier, when it didn’t even exist? Or today? Or ten years from now, when sustainable ag technolhies are able to provide ever so much more? (These aren’t simple questions–I struggle with them myself).
In any case, a good post, and while these are my initial off-the-cuff reactions, I’ll think more on this.
What a great rant! And what good comments, extending it beyond a rant!
My mind immediately went to one of my favorite books, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. I can’t find my copy, so I can’t quote, but there are some memorable descriptions of the family diet in late winter and early spring. (The book is eminently suitable for a Boston locavore blog: The author is at Harvard, and the subject lived just up the road in Maine.)
So, that’s just to say that not extending the growing season can lead to some pretty bleak living.
The other thing my mind immediately leapt to is that local farmers are businesses. They may (or may not) be owned and run by people with high ideals and a commitment to changing the food system, but if they are going to be farming next year, and the year after, and many years to come, then they had best be sustainable businesses, too.
Which is to say, they need to grow what is profitable. This involves, of course, what people want, but also what it costs to produce it. (And many of these farmers may have non-monetary costs in mind, as well.) So if it is profitable to produce corn or tomatoes or greens earlier and earlier (bearing in mind all the costs), then I expect farmers to do that.
My last thoughts occurred as I was writing this: Extending the growing season may cut into the “lull” that a farm owner/manager experiences in winter, but it also extends the work season for employees. As a child I never wondered what my father’s employees did on the off-season, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t sorry as the alfalfa season was extended (in both directions). And the migrant farm workers, of course, had it much, much worse as they moved up and down the state of California following the soft produce crop. Eating locally only improves the lives of farmworkers if it creates a system that sustains them year-round.