Twice this week, in differing contexts, I heard the future will not be centralized. According to market guru Jeremy Rifkin, the energy future won't be behemoth companies dictating products and pricing to us, but rather each and every one of us with space to spare collecting and selling the excess of our own solar, wind or geothermal energy. According to political analyst Matt Bai of The New York Times, Steve Jobs' great genius was to understand that the hierarchical crony capitalism entrenched from the 20th century could be replaced in the 21st by truly democratic sharing as ideas and plans jumped from computer to computer or IPad, from one to one to one more via social networks. People will pop up, speak up and hear each other, exactly what the young ones did in the Arab world last spring. The process is already underway, undermining the current monopolistic big box business, top down bottom line political party model.
This future of individual independence makes the case for farmers' markets. And in this case, the future is here now. We can see and taste it. We can feel it in the joy we get from shopping at one--a joy never replicated in a big box store. Why is that?
Shopping at a so-called "supermarket" submits us to the self-serving machinations of the corporations who own the real estate and stock the shelves. What's on them for us to eat is what they want to be there. And what they want to be there was formulated and processed not for our benefit, but for their bottom line. How much free choice do we really get in that dictatorship? Think about it. Does grabbing your groceries there feel like duty, like jury duty? Or do you just love it, can't wait to go back?
Now think about going to a local farmers' market or two. You pick and choose among many lettuce offerings; you get the truth of provenance and other vital information about the food that's about to enter your body--is it genetically modified, irradiated, poisoned by pesticides?--so you decide. You even participate at times in the pricing. And you process the produce your way. Sometimes, if you make jam or pickles or preserves out of it, you spread it around on your own social network, just the way Rifkin figures energy will be transmitted and Jobs figured ideas would move. Crisscrossing power lines.
In other words, you are more in charge, more in the center of your own life. You are more part of a social network that starts with the face of the farmer who grew the food about to have a very intimate relationship with you, and ends with you serving up or giving away what you have made of it.
Even better, as Jeremy Rifkin pointed out in discussing the future of energy, we will get back in touch with the reality of Nature--and thus our own nature. Rifkin explained that collecting solar energy makes a person pay attention to where and how the sun is, just like wind energy makes one more cognizant of a calm day. So too does the very real seasonality of farm produce. It forcefully reminds us that autumn is not spring, that summertime is the moment of abundance and winter requires advance preparation to survive it. It reminds us that we are not supposed to be eating tomatoes during the snowstorms of January. If we are, they were flown in from who knows where and grown who knows how to trick us into thinking we can have it all all the time--no problem, no worries, no harm. True or false?
Farmers markets are truly places to practice vital feng shui for our body, to harmonize ourselves with Nature the way ancient religions teach us to. After all, like it or not we are a part of it, children of Mother Nature and Father Time. Shopping at farmers markets prompts us in spring to eat fresh greens--dandelion, fiddlehead, asparagus, spinach, chard--which are a tonic that cleans the sludge from sluggish winter blood. It reminds us to rev our body up for the exertion of outdoor summer fun with the extraordinarily nutritious cruciferous cold weather vegetables--cabbage, broccoli, radishes, kohlrabi; and the iron in newly sprouted mushrooms. Then when the heat of summer strikes, the available produce tells us to stuff ourselves with the juicy vitamins of berries, watery tomatoes and cucumbers and melons that will keep us hydrated when we sweat. It signals us to get our protein from corn and beans (in combo), fresh yogurt and cheeses. It teaches us to greet the shorter cooler days of fall with vibrantly colored root vegetables, thick stick-to-the-ribs winter squashes, and the crispness of an apple, the tang of that last berry, the cranberry. You can't mistake this and go wrong.
To feel yourself in time in place is to feel yourself truly alive. What beats that for a joyous high? Three cans of hearts of palm on sale at Piggly Wiggly or the not so Safeway?
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