This Week at the Smart Markets Bristow Farmers' Market

This Week at our Bristow Market
Sunday 10:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Piney Branch Elementary School
8301 Linton Hall Rd.
Bristow, VA 20136
Map

This Week at the Market

Dear Shopper,

We are going to try this one more time, and we do appreciate your patience with us and hope to see a big crowd for a great Back-to-School market. We have been rained out once and scared off the next week with the same stormy forecast, which did not materialize. But we’re back and ready to tackle whatever weather this winter brings.

We will be hosting Patty Repko, our in-house nutrition counselor, who will cook and sample and share her vast knowledge with you and your children. We will also have the cow train from Cows-N-Corn farm for the younger ones.

We will introduce some new vendors to you this week, but we will miss Mike Burner of Holly Brook Farm, who has been pressed into service to help the farmer from whom he rents his land keep the farm going while in a hospital bed.

We look forward to meting many new Piney Branch families and to working with you all year long on a variety of programs to create a healthier school and community.

Come shop for everything now being picked in this area from apples to zucchini and visit our Smart Markets tent for recipes galore.

See you at the market!

From the Market Master

Dear Shopper,

I have recently read a book by journalist Barry Estabrook titled Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. The book expands on a 2009 story in Gourmet by Estabrook that revealed that tomatoes being grown in this country by corporate farms were essentially being picked by slave labor.

The book, published last year, details numerous offenses by the tomato industry, including how they have genetically altered tomatoes to accommodate shipping needs. Estabrook also discusses how tomatoes are grown and picked for shipping and what happens to them on the way to their destinations. It is more than anyone who buys tomatoes outside of a farmers’ market would want to know. And it made me angry, and pessimistic about whether the situation will improve. The details are appalling. Estabrook makes it clear that enforcement of existing laws and regulations to prevent the abuses is not working and probably never will.

The publication of the book brought additional attention to the situation in Florida, and more levels of enforcement were mobilized. But it seems now that the effort that really produced results was a grass-roots partnership between the workers themselves and their outraged supporters in Florida and elsewhere. Just this past Sunday, an op-ed in The Washington Post cited some hope of seeing an end to these horrible living and working conditions. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

I am not going to quote from the articles or the book -- you can read as much as you want by clicking on the links above. And within the Gourmet article, you will find other links that may inspire you, but will also give you pause when you shop next at the grocery store. If big-time growers can get away with this kind of operation in the U.S., just imagine how easy it is for them to undermine laws in other countries.

This story also gives us one more reason to ponder the dynamic of organic versus local. Can you trust that a tomato or a peach or a cantaloupe picked on an “organic” farm in Mexico is even really grown organically? Who is watching those farm operations? And what kind of power do the workers have to enforce the laws of their land or the requirements of an American distributor?

Please read these two pieces and pick up the book if you want to know more -- it will make you cringe. It will also make it hard for you to buy a winter tomato in the grocery store this December.