The sky is clear and it is almost warm in the sun. The farmers market is jammed with people and vendors and vegetables and even fruit, still, though it is the middle of October. The weather has been erratic this summer; the raspberries we never had in July are here now, alongside the pumpkins and other wintry vegetables. Everything I know about growing cycles has mostly been turned on its head, and there really wasn’t any corn this year.
People keep taking their coats off and putting them back on. I catch some people in heavy winter coats sizing up people with no coats at all, trying to figure out if they really need to be bundled up in this weather. The wind is gentle. It wafts. How many things can say they waft? The wind is cold now, and people look down at their market bags to realize that their hands are cold and they wished they had brought their gloves (and remember that they haven’t dug last winter’s gloves out of the coat closet yet).
There are yellow, red, orange crunchy leaves everywhere, and there are lots of people walking with their dogs and their babies and they are wearing things like orange peacoats and decorative scarves.
The leaves that cake the roads, gutters, and medians are still yellow. Early fall. Nothing has turned brown and died yet.
I have a new job selling vegetables for a small, local farm at some farmers markets around Seattle.
I am living that section famous people’s biographies that sounds something like “After school, so and so worked a variety of wacky jobs.” In a book, this part lasts roughly two paragraphs between the chapters about childhood and school and the chapters about becoming self-aware and successful and or getting one’s big break. One paragraph for a sampling of the wacky jobs, and one paragraph for a wacky anecdote to illustrate the wackiness of working a dead-end job. Pop culture is sometimes not an effective medium through which to make sense of one’s life.
I have been at this new job for over a month now.
When I arrive at the market in my truck, I run through the headache of where to park and unload. I empty the load and set up the tent and tables and rises and boxes and baskets and I get my cash box and scale ready. My job is to make things look folksy, farmy, and abundant. Wicker (baskets) and gingham (tablecloths) are responsible for 90% of our sales.
I open the crates of vegetables that make up the bulk of my load. Everything is wet, cold, and bright, snuggled in its waxy cardboard box at seven in the morning. I have been up since 4:30. Last week the sun was up by now.
I am madly in love with the vegetables. I open the crates one by one and tear off the sheet of butcher paper on top used to protect the tops of the cargo, and packed underneath are digit-sized purple and white striped eggplants, hefty deep green cucumbers, the last of the season’s few tomatoes. Every week something new; a box of shiny poblano peppers or ten pounds of pearly baby turnips. One week I find thirty pounds of assorted fingerling potatoes: purples, yellows, reds. I tell my customers to eat them whole, mash them, roast them, just please eat them because these potatoes are straight from god’s ears to your mouth.
It is hard to sound genuine and not too pushy when you live for this food. You tell your customers that you aren’t trying to sell them anything, that you really just want them to eat (you upsell to them in other ways– this is the real part, you want to say). I love this. I want you to have it. You reduce the prices for old people and you give carrots to all of the babies and you promise everyone who buys a mini honeydew that it will be the best melon they have ever laid their lips on.
I open one of the biggest, heaviest boxes in the load. Full of beets; you can tell from the way the weight is distributed… and by the beet greens sticking out the side of the box. I need to feel like I’m gaining some kind of special knowledge from this job. I know those are beets without even looking inside; how useful.
I don’t eat beets but I tell my customers to roast them in tinfoil in the oven for an hour with some olive oil and cloves of garlic. I pull them out of the box, one by one, and place them in a wicker basket raised higher than all of the other baskets. The reds and oranges and pinks of the beets draw in almost as many visitors as my gingham tablecloths. They are like sleeping babies, round and fat from gorging on the stuff of the earth. Their tops are perky and green, with multicolored ribs that give off a sweetness when you eat them. I spend too much time marveling at their shapes and colors and the lengths of their taproots and I fall into my biweekly trance brought on by wondering how these things got to be this way in the natural world and thinking about how beautiful and useful all of these foods are, even things like escarole and parsley, which nobody buys and I mostly just compost.
It takes me an hour to put all of the vegetables in their places. The collards spread out like giant fans in their own box. Three kinds of kale mingle, two greens and a red kind. A coworker says the red kale is just blushing because it has a crush on the girl who sells apple cider. Actually, that’s just me but it’s funnier when it is the kale. The broccolis all stand at attention, florets-up together. The lettuce is packed in tight to fit as many heads as possible into three wooden boxes, bottom ends facing out. People come for the lettuce– it does have to be pretty to sell, unlike the purple cabbages that I wipe off and stack in what have turned out to be seductive little pyramids.
My first customers tell me that everything looks beautiful. They love my display. They come for a bunch of greens or one cucumber and in ten minutes demolish most of the beauty and order I’ve spent the past ninety minutes obsessively engineering. I spent the next seven hours restocking, restacking, taking money, and answering questions.
Is this lettuce? Are these turnips? Is this kale?
This person is inevitably holding escarole, beets, and mustard greens in their hand. I identify these foods for several dozen customers every day. At first I feel helpful, and then I feel indignant, and then I just feel sad that these grown women (and my customers are almost entirely women), with careers and lives and families and 30 or 50 years of life experience cannot tell a turnip from a beet. I try to practice compassion and explain over and over again. I learn to bring colorful, identifying signs for the confusing vegetables.
A woman, any woman, many women, picks up a bunch of beets and asks how much. They’re $2.50 a bunch or three bunches for $6.50, I tell her. It is always a gamble what her reaction will be. Most people respond by digging for change, but a small minority blink and balk, and a special handful bark and toss the beets, which now appear to not be worth anything, back on the pile. When this happens and I look over at the beets, they always look a little less marvelous than they did when I laid them in the morning. I see all of their spots and tiny insect bites. Prices are ridiculous and we make no money whether or not one willingly hands over the ten quarters.
How do you determine the price of beets? This is how: you take the money you spent on seeds, trays, potting soil, tractor maintenance, fuel, labor, heat, row covers, water, soil amendments, clothes, etc etc etc (including the packaging, fuel/time/labor for the farmers market, and rent fees for your market stall) and you add that all up and divide it by the number of beets you have. Nobody wins.
I am off of work for the next three days and in that time I am finally going to sit down and read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. I haven’t read them yet, but I have a strong distaste for Michael Polland and all the other farmers and folks out there who say that customers need to suck it up and shell out for the “real” cost of local food. With that equation up above, local food costs a lot of money. A lot. And that awesome local food has bug bites and imperfections and no, you can’t buy asparagus in October. I spend a lot of time at work thinking about farm subsidies, the Farm Bill, and how I hope that by the time I’m my own farm and farmer, there will be some kind of government support system for folks like me and I will not have to tell the crazy lady who yells at me every week when I tell her the baby bok choi is $2.50 a bunch and does not come in the 3-for-$5 deal that that’s a “great price” considering all of my inputs. It is very tiring and affects my ability to stare at the vegetables for hours and think about infinite beauty and wisdom blah dee blah dee blah.
The last customers of the day are typically younger people, more my age, who stumble out of bed hungover for brunch and remember the market on their way home, bellies full of pancakes and still a little sloshy from last night. They are my greatest hope. I have been working for eight or ten hours at this point, but I cajole them the hardest. I persuade them to try kale, and I write down instructions for making kale chips in the oven. I teach them how to core cabbage, scrub potatoes, clean collards, and grill japanese eggplant frantically, while I take their money and wrap their purchases in bags. I have roughly three minutes from when they enter my stall before they realize I’m not that pretty and they just spend ten dollars on brassicas to send them home with everything I know about how to keep those vegetables from rotting in the crisper. I wax poetic about things like mashed turnips as hard as I can, hoping someone my age will take my word for it and buy a pound, bring them home, eat them up (mashed with cinnamon and nutmeg and butter like applesauce!), and join the friggin revolution already.
