What Goes Around Comes Around

An honest exploration of why farmers markets continue to operate on the fringes of our food culture

“I really should start coming here more often!”

I’ve worked 1,177 farmers markets at time of writing (trust me, I’ve kept count), and this is, by far, the most common sentiment I hear about farmers markets. For every market “regular” I meet, there are at least 10 people at each market who wish they would come more frequently. 

I bet you’ve thought it, too. I bet you’re thinking it right now. Even when your week is packed solid and you know you just can't find your way there, every now and then when you’re making your grocery list, a part of you vaguely remembers you want to bring home more food from direct, local sources like farmers markets.

So why do we struggle so much to get ourselves to farmers markets?

The surface-level answers to that question are not exactly a mystery. It’s because farmers markets are inconvenient and you can’t always make it to them, right? Or maybe they’re too expensive. Or maybe it’s because you still have to go to the grocery store anyways because no one in your town is making handmade artisanal fair trade toilet paper. 

But what are we really saying when we give those justifications? We’re saying we don’t see the value in making the extra trip. We don’t experience enough benefit from the extra dollar per pound. We struggle to consistently make it to the farmers market because the idea of the farmers market and the reality of the farmers market are miles apart. 

The idea of the farmers market is traditional at worst, and utopian at best. The alternative food system, of which farmers markets serve as the common entry point, is literally the last closed-loop economic ecosystem available to us in the developed world. It’s the last (and historically speaking, the first) place where you can meet every crucial stakeholder of the supply chain. Let me say that a little more clearly…

The farmers market is literally the only place where the entire community can consistently come together to support each other through earnest commerce. Here, you can connect on a deep, personal level with the people who make things you want or need to buy.

In a world where we are bombarded with 8x more advertisements per day than our parents were, and where we trick ourselves into taking any online content at face value, the local food economy is the refuge devoid of brand-speak. Within it, we are reminded to slow down and form our own, unadulterated opinions about exactly how we should spend our hard earned dollars.

And what better medium than food for this kind of direct, earnest moment of self-reflection! Food is almost certainly the most intimate thing that we purchase on a regular basis. You could make an argument that shelter or clothing is close, but only with food do we literally take what we buy and put it into our bodies. Only food literally becomes a part of us. 

Though we might know that intellectually, we still rarely put in that extra effort to go to the farmers market because the reality is we almost never actually experience those magical moments, or those deeper senses of connection. What the farmers market could be feels so good. We may not consciously notice this, but when we park our car and start walking toward the sea of market tents, a cheerful little vignette plays out in our head. This place we’re walking into is something close to what our great-grandparents had… a real community. Happy folks and happy families, getting what they need to nourish themselves and their loved ones. Proud, beaming farmers, showing off their exquisite produce and warmly chatting with their effusive patrons. Noble artisans, the decades they’ve poured into their craft showing in the wrinkles of their face, inspiring you with ideas for how you can Eat Better this week. Folksy music plays in the background, reminding you to slow down and appreciate the beauty of life. A cup of coffee and a croissant from the local baker that’s so good you’re going to dream about it tonight. 

Then the reality hits within seconds as soon as you step foot in the market.

You are alone. No one will explain this place to you. No farmer seems all that excited to be there.. that one guy seems pretty friendly but he looks so busy. You can’t remember what’s in your fridge and your imagination is so closed off you don’t even know what you might want to make this week. You remember those peaches you bought last time and how half of them went bad within a day or two. You see a new type of vegetable that looks interesting, but you have no idea how you’re supposed to cook it or eat it. Those people over there look like they’re lined up for that fresh caught seafood, and you wonder if you’re good enough in the kitchen to justify paying twice what you pay at the store for the same cut. There are four different farmers selling broccoli. Which one is the right one for you? Talk to your farmer? What does that even mean?

Maybe if you just snap a picture for Instagram and buy some strawberries, that will make you a good person and you can get on with your day.

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The idea of the farmers market is transformational. But the reality is that farmers markets have a (not unreasonable) reputation of somehow being both bougie sideshow virtue-signal WASP traps and also low-brow carnie-adjacent hustle bazaars. 

How the hell did that happen? How did we get here?

I’m not positive the reason matters, because all the roads lead to our challenges as a food culture at large. Personally, the story that resonates with me is that the current state of farmers markets is the natural result of common food marketing and messaging, programming generations of food shoppers to think “cheaper, faster, easier”. The idealized version of the farmers market is none of those things, and all of us in the alternative food system - farmers, artisans, customers, market managers - struggle to reconcile the urge to do Better Food Things with our default American programming for “cheaper, faster, easier.”¹

If you’re like me, at this point in an essay like this, you have a little voice in the back of your head telling you that the writer might have a point, and that it would behoove you to dedicate yourself a bit more to Doing Your Part. Also, if you’re like me, you have way too many of these moments in your life, so you’ve learned to pick and choose your battles. It would be nice to be the kind of person that goes to farmers markets and “votes with your food dollar”, but at some point, self-preservation is going to kick in.

As an aside, participating in your local food economy is one of those weird issues that, when done correctly, ends up being a net positive in terms of energy. Food is pretty cool in that way, since it’s directly connected to energy levels. But it personally took me about a year of working in farmers markets to wrap my head around the value proposition of the alternative food system, and to start deriving more energy from it than I was putting into it as an eater. 

Anyways, lucky for you, the rest of this piece isn’t about browbeating customers into being more conscientious consumers. I’m hoping to reach the farmers, artisans, market managers, and anyone else who plays a role in making a farmers market a reality (but please do keep reading!).

Let’s go back to that moment you’re stepping foot into the farmers market, with that idyllic market fantasy in your head.

I would argue that, at this exact moment, you are far more open-minded and receptive than you typically are. You are primed. You are ready to be inspired, to try new things, to think differently. 

The missing ingredient? Infectious enthusiasm. You’ll be lucky to meet even one or two people who are as enthusiastic as you want to be about this adventure. As an ecosystem, we are so far from creating a critical mass.

This dearth of perceptible pride and ownership in our work is the single biggest problem with bringing new people into the alternative food system. Whatever love and passion went into creating these provisions and bringing them to you is so far removed from the tableau as to be invisible. If you want to get excited about your food, you’re probably going to have to evoke that emotion on your own. 

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There are plenty of justifications for why so many of us who work at farmers markets fail to display even a modicum of pride in the products and the farms/companies that we represent. 

For starters, much of the work we do all week is physical, repetitive, and stigmatized as “peasant work”, leaving many of the people you see at the market depleted. Plus, many in the farming and food industries choose their line of work specifically because they’d rather work in solitude, and don’t particularly enjoy social interaction.²

On top of that, the saleswork itself is much more demanding than the credit it receives. The early hours are brutal, setting up and tearing down a market stall is very physical, you’re fighting the elements more weeks than not, and we haven’t even touched on the emotional labor. Anyone who sells a premium product at a market will face constant smirks and snide comments from price-first shoppers. A percentage of customers get off on the class inequities alone and will breezily condescend. And some folks are simply socially awkward or straight up inappropriate.³ Moreover, even for salespeople who take their craft seriously and want to improve, there’s this weird, MLM-inspired “hustler” skillset that will teach gimmicks to improve sales instead of helping salespeople get in touch with their authentic pride and dignity.

I love selling at markets, it’s my favorite part of my week, but I believe market sales is one of the most demanding “low-skill” positions in modern culture. Given all that, a farmer, artisan, or salesperson could be forgiven for not being able to tap into the pride they have for what they are selling… they could be forgiven, but it’s still their problem and no one is going to fix it for them.

And as if all that isn’t enough, producers still have to choose whether to contend with the “cheaper, faster, easier” ethos, or actively work against it. Either way, it’s impossible to ignore: there’s very little embedded in our culture to remind us to appreciate what we eat. We eat too fast, we don’t cook enough, and we don’t spend as much on groceries (as a percentage of our income) as other cultures. American food culture is a meme to the rest of the world. But the effect our food values have on quality-over-quantity producers is arguably even more dramatic. 

The food industry plays this cruel joke, where so few producers of good food are capable of scraping together even a middle-class lifestyle, whereas there are so many more professional opportunities in the conventional food space. The alternative food system tends to attract people who lose themselves in their work, and don’t tend to notice how much of themselves they are giving up or how much they get back in return.⁴ It underscores just how uneven the playing field is in the food industry, and how much the conventional food system externalizes its costs and geographically exploits cheap labor pools. You know that doing your shopping at places like farmers markets involves paying a premium, and you also know you’re cutting out greedy middlemen, but somehow you’re still vaguely aware that no one is really getting rich off this. So many of us within the system struggle with walking the tightrope of charging a price that feels fair while still trying to cobble together a respectable living for ourselves and our teams, but at the end of the day, many farmers and artisans find themselves in situations where they don’t believe they have the time or resources to appreciate food in the same way they would like to see their food appreciated.

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So what do we do about this? Well, simply stating the problem and being aware of it would be a good start:

We have a problem with pride and ownership in the alternative food system, and we can’t expect customers to care about what we do until we show that we care first.

Beyond that, I think the starting points should be pretty obvious. If you work in the alternative food system, understand that you need to show folks that you give a fuck. If you simply cannot do that, prioritize finding someone who gets you and will share that message for you, and then pay them what they are worth. If you need someone to help you find the right words, consider that your single most important hire, regardless of whether it’s a salesperson, a head of marketing, or an outside consultant. Don’t stop searching until you find someone who gives you goosebumps when they describe you and your company to someone else. Does that seem borderline insane and unrealistic? It probably is. Folks who can do that job well are incredibly hard to come by and typically pretty expensive (though potentially worth every penny). The endgame, for most of us, is that we need to do the hard, deep, personal work necessary to learn how to authentically advocate for ourselves and our work.

Farmers: take the time to think about and articulate why people should specifically buy your produce. Understand the best simple recipes to highlight the quality of your ingredients, and then ask your customers if they’d be interested in hearing about how you like to prepare that product. When you’re ringing up a customer, volunteer a little fun fact about the item(s) they’re buying.. how the growing season is going, why you chose to grow that specific variety, etc. Find subtle ways to remind them how good you are at your job. Stay mindful of that customer fantasy of the farmers market and think about how to help them become a better, more connected eater. And remember that customer engagement is a skill. Understand that you might suck at connecting with your customer at the beginning, and that it is worthwhile to keep practicing.

And if you service a huge metropolis like Los Angeles with lots of farmers market options, take a stand for the sake of your dignity and only work with market managers and organizations that care as much as you do. You don’t need me to tell you how much opportunism and dubiousness there is in some corners of this industry. Think about what you’re telling yourself when you continue to work with people and organizations who don’t hold themselves to the same standards you do.⁵

Market managers: have pride in who you bring into your market, and don’t compromise your culture in the name of product diversity. Visit your farms and production kitchens (often!), practice what you preach when you are eating at home, and treat communication as the most important skill you can develop. Accept that our industry’s generic social media strategy is ineffective and start experimenting and investing in new ways to connect with your community. Be vulnerable and tell difficult truths. Make sure your customers, especially new customers, know who you are, and that they are in good hands in the space that you’ve curated.

As for Blöde Kuh’s own little corner of the farmers market, here’s how I walk the talk: I ask a TON of questions. I ask about their diets. I ask about their cooking and eating habits. I ask about what’s in their fridge or what else they’re buying today. And then I watch them and wait for their eyes to light up and open up about themselves. And if we click, we have an honest-to-god conversation about food, and how to eat better. I make recommendations for other vendors to visit. I tell them what’s in season, and what I’m really digging on right now. 

But wait a minute. Wasn’t I talking about pride and ownership? Shouldn’t I be explaining how I let the customer know how proud I am about Blöde Kuh and our products? Well, the pride I have in our business and our products is expressed in what I don’t say. I assume our products sell themselves, so I don’t really need to talk about them much. Of course I’ll introduce and sample the product and explain why we chose these particular products to express ourselves, but I treat that part of the conversation as a formality. If you come up to my booth, I assume you are going to fall in love with my product, but what I need is for you to fall in love with the farmers market — OUR farmers market. 

TL;DR: What we do, as food producers and purveyors who prioritize quality and craft above all else, can have a transformational effect on the lives of our customers. We do not make commodities and we are not rewarded for the number of pounds we yield or the margins we squeeze out of our products. We are rewarded for being exceptional at what we do, and giving our customers something they value that they can’t get anywhere else. There are so many people who want to see you and appreciate what you do, they simply lack the tools to get there themselves. These are the folks you see episodically at the farmers market, maybe once every month or two. They’re the ones you see walking around without bags, keeping to themselves and afraid to make eye contact with anyone. These people are conflicted… a part of them is pining for that deeper, more connected experience, they just don’t see any evidence that they’ll get that if they open themselves up. It’s on us, as an ecosystem, to start developing those tools and giving folks the reasons they need to keep coming back.

1. There are countless other valid reasons at play here. We could focus on the erosion of our attention spans, our general unwillingness to connect with and trust strangers, our awareness of countless other issues that deserve our focus, general stress… but honestly none of the reasons are all that interesting because they’re all about how we prioritize and focus our energy, what matters is whether we believe the alternative food system is important enough to address, and then figuring out how we address it going forward.

2. A pet peeve of mine. Sorry, pal, when you started your farm, you started a business, and sales is a part of running a business. It’s your job to solve that problem somehow, some way.

3. Such an under-appreciated issue especially for women in this line of work.

4. This is regularly highlighted in chef culture - Consider this a reminder to go consume some Bourdain content

5. One of the most energizing things Blöde Kuh did as a company was to stop working with a particular large farmers market organization that took absolutely zero pride in the markets they were putting on. They did the bare minimum and clearly focused on maximizing their profits above any particular sense of integrity or mission. I remember, after we dropped them, being astonished by how much our company’s energy shifted, even though that was the whole reason we quit them in the first place. I’m still so proud of that decision.