by James Simpkins
I grew up in suburbs, and no one ate very well there--but it wasn't a bad gig to live there. Still, great food wasn’t really an option—you just went to the grocery store and ate what they had. It turns out we had wonderful farms and plenty of freshly grown produce about the minutes from the house, but they weren’t exactly widely available. Twenty years ago, the farmers’ market of central Ohio amounted to a pick-up parked on the side of the road with its tail-gate open with bushels of corn or stacks of fresh beefsteak tomatoes in the back. The pick-ups are still parked out there during July and August, but nowadays you don’t have to cruise back roads to find farm fresh produce, you just get on the internet and find your closest farmers’ market.
Urban, especially sub-urban, places have started to see a change over the food landscape in recent years, and the in-roads of goods from the country to the city have started being not only more visible, but also more accessible. Historically, this is significant. I mean farmers have been taking their wares to market in the city since urban environments started springing up 6,000 years ago. But they faded out of view after the Industrial Revolution and the rise of our modern food distribution systems. But that’s changing, and for the rising number of urban and suburban gourmands, this can only be good news. Just look at Connecticut: Less than five years ago, we had a handful of farmers’ markets across the state—mostly nowhere convenient. As I have written before, the Collinsville farmers’ market started just a few years ago with less than five vendors. Now it is at capacity and the waiting list is long, not to mention there are more than 140 farmers’ markets across the state on every day of the week from June until October. If we take farmers’ markets as a sign of the demand for fresh food (and we do), this bodes well for getting more fresh, local food into our local supply chain. What I didn’t fully realize until the other day was that it is blurring the lines between rural and urban, farm and city, and bringing farmers into direct, personal encounters with the general public and forming mutually beneficial and sometimes exclusive relationships. (I know I won’t buy beets from anyone except Tom…a local farmer in Burlington, CT)
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On Cooking
James, what are you talking about? What about The Food Network? “Julie and Julia”? Rachel Ray? I mean, food is so “yum-o”, how could the practice of cooking go second fiddle?
Well, to use those examples: 1) The Food Network is a TV channel---you really shouldn’t be cooking yourself when the next episode of “Look How Much Better I Cook Than You Do” is on. 2) “Julie & Julia” is a decent movie about a young woman with a cool blog idea piggy-backing on a cultural icon. At least she’s in a kitchen. 3) Rachel Ray has a talk show. I know that after I get done listening to all that high discourse, I’m too tired to cook. Michael Pollan just wrote a great (and slightly less catty) piece on this very topic of not cooking in the New York Times Magazine that I’d recommend reading. The upshot is that cooking as entertainment necessarily wants—no, needs—you out of the kitchen. I’d like to convey a couple of my own reasons to get back into it.
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