Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Whiteness and Farmers Markets: Performances, Perpetuations … Contestations?

Alison Hope Alkon1, Christie Grace McCullen

Academics and activists highlight the potential for alternative agrifood movements to contribute to the evolving coalescence of justice and sustainability. This potential, however, is constrained by what scholars have identified as the prevalent whiteness of such movements. This paper uses ethnographic research at two northern California farmers markets to investigate how whiteness is performed and perpetuated through the movements’ discourses and practices. We found that many managers, vendors and customers hold notions of what farmers and community members should be that both reflect and inform an affluent, liberal habitus of whiteness. Although whiteness pervades these spaces, we have also witnessed individual discourses and acts of solidarity and anti-racism, as well as fledgling institutional efforts to contest white cultural dominance. We conclude by discussing the potential of farmers markets to create an anti-racist politics of food.

available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00818.x/abstract

Why make breakfast in your family bach, when you can stroll down the road to the Sawmill Cafe and have an eggs benedict or french toast with pears stewed in earl grey tea, that's actually better than any you'd be able to buy in old Ponse-snob-be (aka Ponsonby in downtown Auckland), while sitting outside in their nice garden and listening to the low throb of some Augustus Pablo dub reggae?



The Sawmill Cafe is awesome. It's not run by rich jokers and everything about it is just...good. It somehow does not clash with the township, and it's brilliant to have somewhere to get breakfast and a really good coffee after going to the beach. I've known Ed, Ben & Nicola of the Guiness family who run the Sawmill, since my late teens and shared many hazy early morning moments with Ed & Celia. I had some of my most enjoyable DJ gigs ever at the Sawmill, back when dropping Outstanding by the Gap Band or Flashlight by Parliament-Funkadelic next to Indio Silver Club by Daft Punk was unheard of in the city (way before Daft Punk got revived by indie kids) but would go down a treat with the Sawmill's mix of country kids, city escapees and artist bohos. The Sawmill makes me think of playing New Year's eve in a gypsy tent in a paddock with Ed making ridiculous watermelon cocktails. The Guiness family do everything so well: it's the only place in New Zealand where I had PROPER thin crust pizza... (their pizzas are named after their family members, e.g. the Picky Nicky) and their new microbrewery's offerings are mighty fine - especially the Crystal wheat beer. The beer is actually made by a guy with some kind of pro bono system where he keeps his brewery on the Sawmill property without paying rent and uses the Sawmill logo; the Guiness family have no financial investment in it, but they have it on tap.

Anyways, the Guiness family keeps it reals, and when I complained of missing watercress in Germany, Ed'll say "Just go down to the creek and grab some mate" and then launches into a story of fishing on choppy water or the cows he's keeping by his little house that he built right beside a waterfall. Ed's lifestyle in Leigh is a panacea to city-dwelling emmigrants like me & Celia. Maybe we wouldn't be much good at wrestling crayfish with our bare hands, but the fact that he does is a reassuring fact, an ideal to hold sacred.

So far, Leigh has remained the nice little harbour fishing village with baches that it always was, with the Sawmill as the jewel in its crown... however, nearby Matakana (about 15 minutes drive away) has lost its dishevelled bohemian edge and fallen prey to the march of the middle class, the crassest sign of which is the Matakana Farmer's Market and the surrounding complex of villas with jewellery stores and an upmarket butcher with Jamie Oliver kitchen ware.



I felt I wasn't the only person at the market feeling slightly at odds with the white glare of the sun umbrellas and the harsh ochre tones of the ornamental gravel underfoot. Not to mention the obvious 'life style block' owners like the dude selling italian sausages or the grey haired American selling olive oil. To all of this, one reply seemed obvious, in fact it loomed over the site, painted on a building on the opposite side:



Still, we did get a nice sack of mixed salads with edible flowers, some smoked garlic (it didn't have much noticeable impact on anything I cooked with it, though it smelled nice while preparing the steamed cockles), some delicious sparkling feijoa fruit wine (which also takes me back to sun soaked recoveries in the late nineties at the Sawmill), some Mahurangi oysters, some dark purple grape juice, and some figs.

The duck eggs, and the location by the river, are pretty, if you can manage to ignore the shit-coloured gravel underfoot:







The flabby personality-bleached Omaha millionaires munching on mussel fritters got a bit much though, so we escaped with the oysters back to my family bach in Leigh, and ate them with a cup of what we kiwis call 'gumboot tea' (i.e. cheap & black like PG Tips) by the BBQ where two fat kereru pigeons ate their own lunch. And we in turned threatened to become the lunch of mosquitoes.
I couldn't really enjoy the oysters after having had two recent feasts of Bluff oysters.

Actually this farmers market isn't in Upper Hutt (birthplace of the first Kiwi hip hop group Upper Hutt Posse, whose member DLT went on to release Chains, a solo career-launching single for Che Fu), but in nextdoor city north of Wellington, sunny Porirua.

The Moore Wilson Farmer's Market (located in a big shed next to an outpost of the trendy wholesale resaler) could be evidence of the spread of the idle bourgeois playground usually called a 'farmers market' and typified by luxury items alongside organic produce,

but despite some pretty delicious manuka-smoked chilli-flavoured venison salami and a German baker, this market keeps it real .....with garlic chucked on benches, yummy apple juice sold by an old bloke from Grey Town, produce from Hawkes Bay, and the crowning glory of any kiwi enterprise: a pie-warmer stocked with a few potato-tops.

Expect a few food miles incurred by that salami and the Hawkes Bay stuff, though, eco campers.

BBQ ribs from the sausage maker who has a little factory on site: GRIMEY. But good.



The same sausage maker whips up a paella which was pretty good though i'm not a huge paella fan:



Germans would be well catered to with this:



And this:

An article in the NY Times discusses how, just as buying at Whole Foods is not necessarily instant bonus karma points, neither is shopping at local farmers' markets.

One of the points in the article is that wasted food counts for a huge amount of the carbon quota caused by food consumption/production. Depends how much edible food you are in the habit of throwing in the trash, I guess. If you are buying more food than you eat, the food production enviro-costs outweight the benefits.

Since I'm living in a city of apartment-dwellers, maybe I should try to start a local collective compost initiative. Or save scraps and go out to Erik's dad's village once a week to contribute dutifully to the compost heap? We are planning to stake our claims to a patch in Erich-senior's garden when spring comes, so maybe the vege-scrap ferrying will be feasible. And we'd take the train, too... (I'm sure our fellow passengers would appreciate the smell of our virtuous weekly kitchen scraps!!)

Influenced by my Dutch Oma who (dubiously) claims to have had to cut mold out of slices of bread during the war and eaten nettles as salad, I am one of those people who will cook carrots once they've gone all floppy and will stubbornly plan on using that one wilted segment of onion in the fridge which has been there forever. Erik hates this, as he's been brought up to be paranoid of the terrible health risks of mold and bacteria. He tells me that Turkish people leave a cut onion in their fridges specifically to absorb bacteria. I, on the other hand, would be happy to use the leaves from those two basil plants in the window which have half-dried up and which have mold sprinkled like snow across the surface of the dirt they're planted in. The one thing that I have learnt can't be used once it's gone a bit squiffy: parsley. Bad vibes.

Although I think it's a type of trivial obsessive-compulsiveness more than any great laudible enviro-friendly habit, I also freeze unused egg yolks, and vege scraps for stock, and slices of stale bread for bread crumbs, and reuse plastic wrap and random small plastic bags that nuts&seeds came in. I tried saving lemon rinds to soak in the bottom of the shower as a natural de-scumming technique ...but as we don't have a plug, it didn't work too good... I still need to get a non-leaching stainless steel bottle for carrying water.
I did read about a company in the UK that makes designer coffee tables out of coffee grinds...
Now, if we can just come up with a good use for potato peels apart from as a dressing for burn victims!
(Maybe as a glue for our huge collections of coffee tables?)

I'm not sure on the point in the article below about canned tomatoes: it's hard to see a can as more enviro-friendly than a 'perishable bag of fresh tomatoes with light packaging', if those tomatoes were then bottled at home.

These days, every single thing you buy has to have its costs & benefits mentally weighed before purchase. "Can it be that it were all so simple," as the Wu Tang song goes...

Some people walk or take the subway to buy their groceries and then compost what they don’t use. But, let’s face it, most of us drive and toss the leftovers into the garbage disposal or the garbage can. In doing so, we may be contributing nearly a quarter of the greenhouse gases associated with our food, research has shown.

Here’s why: Instead of going to the grocery store once a week and stocking up, many consumers are driving for groceries several times a week, if not every day, to all sorts of different stores.

“THE old idea where our mother goes to the store on Wednesday or Thursday with all the coupons to buy all our groceries has changed,” said Harvey Hartman, who tracks consumer behavior as founder and chief executive of the Hartman Group. “Now we are on our way home from work and we say, ‘Oh, geez, what are we going to have for dinner?’ ”

If all the driving wasn’t producing enough greenhouse gases, Mr. Tomich points out that an even bigger factor may be the amount of food that is tossed out, wasting all the energy that was used to produce and transport it.

Certainly, there are many reasons for eating local food — from supporting local farmers to a desire for fresher, potentially tastier food. The research in California, however, offers the prospect of a more nuanced debate on eating a low-carbon diet. In the meantime, Ms. Feenstra said, the research has already led her to one conclusion:

Don’t drive your sport utility vehicle to the farmers’ market, buy one food item and drive home again. Even if you are using reusable bags.

Article in NY Times

Here's the mixed game pie I keep harping on about, from the Broadway Market
in London.

That pie was so bloody damn good. It was the apple of my pie, ah, eye.

It was sold by a nice old fellow with a trestle table, from an award-winning pie-maker who had prepared it herself the night before. (I didn't write down the name unfortunately).

This market has a very nice selection of foods (mostly organic or wild) including yummy Ghanaian stews like okra & pork and a peanut chicken stew (very good and a long queue), some nice 2nd hand clothes and a Japanese lady selling cute knock-offs, some overpriced antiques, old children's textbooks and good-looking bretagne-style crepes, brown and oozing with spinach and cheese.
It's very nice to walk there along the canal from Islington.



This trip to London (stopping off on the way back from Toronto) really changed my opinion about the food offerings of Old Blighty!

Other treats over four days included tasty soda bread from Selfridges supermarket, huge decadent Morrocan meringues covered in pistachios piled up in the window of a restaurant near Angel in Islington, very good lamb tagine, dips and flatbreads from one of three restaurants in Islington all called Gallipoli, and, on the more traditional tip, a YUM sticky date pudding – warm, steamed, light-textured but rich flavoured.

Another highlight was the famous London "foodie" (hate that word) destination the Borough Market
, which is in a very urban setting (under the struts of London Bridge?): we had warm organic apple juice with honey which tasted like apple pie, and bought an artisan brown loaf (I say brown because I'm not sure exactly what was in it,) from the Degustibus stall. Is artisan the most overused and confusing word of the moment? We saw an 'artisan toaster' at Saturn mega electronic store the other day. I'm waiting for the slow food movement toaster....it takes five days to slowly dry your bread into a cracker.

Of course there are still plenty of windows advertising jellied eels or baked beans and chips, too...

Top nosh, geezer.

Nothing like a good pie!!

Early morning pig carcasses on the north side of the St. Lawrence Market, Toronto.

I'm ashamed to admit we only knew about this place through a visitor from NYC who had read about it in a Wallpaper magazine supplement.

At this hour of the morning, the handful of people browsing (as well as the stall-holders) were less Marc Jacobs and Northface, decidedly more in the arena of ancient parkers and homespun knits.



On Saturdays the smaller North hall is used for an organic farmer's market. We went there straight from the afterhours (in Toronto anything open past 2am is called an afterhours) at about 6am...eschewing dodgy home fries at Fran's diner for the warm, familial atmosphere of a market in its calm and sleepy opening hours. No one seemed too hurried, no one was hussling or shouting at each other – maybe it was because of the laid back Canadian temperament but the atmosphere was comparable to a provincial library, especially the spectacled, brown-cardiganned woman who stutteringly sold us her malted, hand made 7 grain bread. No shortage of strapping sons helping their dad load piles of potatoes, elk venison or jars of honey either though.





Top notch cider (we drank 2 litres in about 2 seconds):



Home made apple cranberry crisp and wild blueberry pies (we bought a pumpkin pie):



Across the street is the South hall of the St Lawrence Market which is open daily except Monday:



We were convinced by a Ukrainian lady in the basement to buy a piece of a big coiled up sausage she had just baked, which was herby and juicy. We also bought a still-warm hot cross bun:



Smoked pork hocks:



Famous Canadian peameal bacon, a variety of unsmoked lean back bacon that has been sweet pickle-cured and coated in yellow cornmeal, though originally, as the name suggests, peameal was used. This should be distinguished from the imposter that is often called Canadian bacon in the U.S. but which is actually just sliced ham. Goes great with maple syrup.



Later on that night... we cracked open the pie, which was distinguishable from store-bought pies by its light, flaky and carameralised-around-the-edges crust:



and the bread. Top marks to the lady in the brown cardigan. The bread had a dense but light crumb, just soft and crumbly enough, with a pleasant molasses undertone. With avocado and a glass of cider, a remarkably effective hang over cure.

The day I really started to love Toronto was when we took a taxi to the vegetarian pan-south-Asian spot called 668 (at 885 Dundas). We had water chestnut salad and noodles, then got a moist piece of vegan banana bread and a cup of house-roasted blend at CaffèBRASILIANO (849 Dundas West, at Euclid) - a cafeteria/diner spot with lunch specials in steamer trays and feels like it's been there for fifty years - decor is all brown and orange and there are cabbies and grumpy old men lounging around shooting the breeze.



We then wandered further west, past Superior Sausage and a funny old wedding supply store with faded crochet patterns and dusty glassware in its window. Dundas is a broad street and peppered with vintage stores, Portuguese family houses, and gusts of fresh autumn wind.



We came across the Trinity Bellwoods Park organic farmers' market which ran from June 5th to October 30th (inaugurated this year), completely by accident. In the late afternoon golden light under an autumn panorama the scene was idyllic. Wouldn't it be great if every part of town including poor areas could be serviced by little markets like these?

Not that farmer's markets are anything new, but the contrast of finding a really good one in the middle of a big city is almost shocking. It is such a welcome change to the impersonal nature of our modern lives, to be interacting and chatting with people who make the products we are consuming, as a momentary community is born around paper cups of fair trade coffee and samples of cheese and textures and tastes all outdoors in good clean air. Not really a yuppie hang out either... mostly good, honest ex-hippies.



It's also a relief when the guy selling the bread speaks German. (Alchemy baking company):





Organic (non alcoholic) cider direct from a farmer's market is really the best cider of all. Apple juice is very big in Germany (little kids seem to drink nothing but apple juice mixed with sparkling mineral water), but I have never been passionate about it before (except as a mixer e.g. with sweet-potato shochu). But since this North American trip I think I have become an apple juice 'afficionado'. Super fresh cider straight from the farm is brown, deep tasting, and tastes like all your autumns or gulps of farm air condensed into a glass.
Most store-bought ciders are no comparison at all. We bought this excellent drop from Trinity Bellwoods market:



When you reach the corner of Dundas and Ossington there are more Portuguese run stores like a fish shop with evil sea eels.





If you turn left into Ossington you'll find a French soup kitchen (potages and veloutés), excellent vegetarian restaurant called Get Real!, a really good second hand book store (Babel Books at 123 Ossington), many home redecorating stores due to the Portuguese traditionally performing a lot of construction work in Toronto, the decent iDeal cafe, and Venezia Bakery with its wonderful Portuguese custard tarts in their crisp pastry shells. Right at the bottom of the street is Sweaty Betty's, a very cozy spot, with a jukebox that can play Judas Priest or Willie Nelson, and a raised area with nicely mismatched furniture ("velour food stamp chic") "This crimson-washed boîte is well-doused in the woozy cologne of stale beer and panelled in photos of tattooed sailors—no designer cocktails, just the real juice (absinthe, scotch and an impressive selection of tequila)." And a good honest back terrace for smokers. It is directly across from the Toronto Western Hospital Men's Detox Centre.

If you are into strong coffee, used copies of Hemingway or Balzac, old records, galleries, shops filled with strange ephemera and dusty old seventies frocks and stuffed animals and racing helmets, cheap whiskey and tasty things to nibble along the way, delivered without too much pretension, walking along Dundas & Ossington is the way to spend a perfect day.