The best thing about farmers' markets? Nobody owns them
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NORTHAMPTON - It was last summer around June when I began to notice a fair number of people hanging out at our farmers' market not buying anything. Mothers with toddlers in strollers, guys on their breaks from work, all sorts of people sitting alone or chatting with one another and, for the most part, ignoring the vegetables and other products surrounding them.
The sight filled me then, as it does now, with a great deal of satisfaction. Our market is located on a generally underused plaza behind Thornes Marketplace, so to see it become a destination point for loiterers (I use the term with tremendous affection) is to me a measure of our success.
What's a farmers' market for? The simple answer is that the market exists to connect food producers directly with customers. It's a model that makes sense: In a business with as low a profit margin as farming, take out the middleman and give your dollars directly to the people growing the food (or baking the bread or making the cheese or whatever).
This is certainly one of the main reasons Oona and I started the market three years ago. We needed to move our vegetables and couldn't bear to sell them wholesale.
But this doesn't explain why people standing around gabbing and not buying anything is a sign that things are going well. If it were all about the money, we'd be hoping to see the wallets of every person who steps onto the plaza.
Public space
The fact is, farmers' markets are about a lot more than money or food. At base, farmers' markets are about creating public space.
The space is already there, of course - whether you're talking about Gothic Street, the Amherst parking lot, the Ashfield green, or our plaza behind Thornes - but here's the amazing thing that happens when you erect a dozen or couple dozen 10-by-10-foot canopies and fill them with the bountiful produce of the region: people gather, they talk, they run into their next-door neighbor who they haven't spoken to in a month, kids play, people complain to one another, give each other advice, overhear snatches of juicy gossip, introduce a new friend, watch someone they don't know but think they might like. Democracy happens - or if democracy seems too beefy a word, let's call it civic life, civic vitality, the encounter of lively minds and physical bodies (no offense Facebook) in a mutually shared space.
Sociologists have written about the importance of chance encounters and unplanned interactions to the health of urban communities. The resilience of the social fabric, they argue, depends less on planned meetings with people you know than it does on the likelihood that you'll have fairly frequent verbal and non-verbal encounters with strangers and acquaintances (especially when the people you encounter come from a wide variety of backgrounds).
A good farmers' market is a snapshot of the region at this exact moment, a newspaper report from the soil, a story told with just the right amount of detail about the goings-on in the ground. This is certainly part of what draws people in. They need to eat, they want to eat well, and they want regular contact with the sources of their food.
But there's another sense in which the vegetables, the fruit, the breathtaking flowers - all that color! - are all merely a lure drawing people in so that they might have a simple, satisfying conversation. And this is another reason why food accessibility is such an important issue, why it's necessary for farmers' markets to accept SNAP benefits: to increase the economic diversity of people who are encountering one another inside the public space.
In the end, the best thing about farmers' markets is that nobody owns them. I mean, who's ultimately in charge of a farmers' market? Whose interests are most significant? The farmers? The citizens? The customers? The surrounding business owners? The city? (but if so, which department?).
Ask a different person and you'll get a different answer, and this shows how important farmers' markets are to each of our lives in these towns and cities.
Next time you're at the market, add these to your list of staples: not just the pasture-raised beef, the sweet corn, the Honeycrisps, the Brandywines, the freshly baked bread, but also the chance encounters, the overheard conversations, the sight of all the strangers and their glorious faces, the pleasure you feel at watching your toddler horse around with a new friend, and last but not least, throw in a nap or two.
That's right, a nap.
In one of my all-time favorite books, "A Pattern Language," the authors talk about the importance of people being able to nap in public. It's about personal comfort and public trust, and it's a mark of a park's success, they say, when people can come there and fall asleep.
At our market we aspire to such greatness. I'll know we've truly done our job well when I can look around the market and see - behind the fiddle player and the kids trying to climb the lamppost - a delivery-person or parent or shop-owner snoozing.
In fact, I'll give a free watermelon to the first person over six years old I find catching some shut-eye on the plaza on a Tuesday afternoon. Hurry up, though. We're all pretty tuckered here at Town Farm. We might beat you to it.
Gathering views
A subcommittee of the Northampton Agricultural Commission is conducting a survey of customers of Northampton's farmers' markets.
It's a moment for all of us citizen-customer-gabber-eaters to weigh in on what's most crucial about our markets, to voice our opinions and observations about what's working and what could be improved. Anyone who has ever been to any of the Northampton markets should fill it out.
You can find a paper survey at each of the markets, or - better yet - you can go directly to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/farmersmarkets and fill out the survey online.
Ben James, who runs Town Farm in Northampton with his wife, Oona Coy,
is writing a summer column about the enterprise. To learn more about
the farm, visit them at the Tuesday Market in downtown Northampton or
check out nohotownfarm.com.
