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

The Gingerbread House arrives this week! Right before your eyes, made-to-order cupcakes and all kinds of other goodies will appear from that famous and much-maligned oven. Our very own Gingerbread Lady, Shelby, is not a witch but a lovely and lovable baker who makes sweetmeats for children of all ages. She might even let you look inside, but have those breadcrumbs ready.

Finally we have some strawberries — lots of them this week. A few more spring veggies have managed to ripen in this cool and wet spring. It’s tough to wait for summer tomatoes, corn, and peaches, but the wonderful part of shopping at a seasonal and producer-only market is that you learn to eat what is being grown and picked in your own area as it is being picked, not many weeks later after the produce has traveled hundreds or even thousands of miles. And at a market, you are often buying produce that was picked the day before if not the morning of your purchase. Do yourself a favor and try a strawberry at the market, and you will taste everything I have just written.

Ask Mike Burner about what he has in the freezer — he plans to bring his little Cornish game hens, broiler chickens, eggs, and ground beef. And after all that talk about not planting this year and focusing on his meats, we all know he couldn’t do that, so pretty soon he will tomatoes and much more, including fennel! I love fennel, and after you try it in some recipes, you will too.

We will miss the World’s Tastiest Food Truck this weekend, but they will be back next week.

See you at the market!

From the Market Master

It’s not a stretch for me to say that I learn something new every day; I work with so many different people on so many different projects, and I do read a lot. But last evening I learned in one article lots of things I did not know and which happen to directly inform all those things I do.

Michael Pollan is at it again, going where no writer has gone before to enlighten and inspire us to change our lives and, in small ways, to change the world. His most recent piece for the New York Times Magazine is another clearly laid-out indictment of our personal diets as they are dictated by “Big Food” and our personal health as dictated by “Big Pharma.” In the article he moves from the revelation that he had his gut analyzed for levels of good and bad bacteria to a discussion of the history and geography of our diet and how it has evolved to remove from our bodies many of the good bacteria that would normally keep asthma, allergies, and other autoimmune diseases out of our bodies. It would seem that the greatest threats to our daily health may not be the bad stuff out there but the lack of good stuff in our own bodies to fight off the bad stuff.

You need to read this to see how his argument develops. But his final point, once again, is that the “components of a microbiota-friendly diet are already on the supermarket shelves and in farmers’ markets.” He reminds us that “the less a food is processed, the more of it that gets safely through the gastrointestinal tract and into the eager clutches of the microbiota” (the collective microbes in our bodies). And as he often does, he explains in great detail why his major point is so important for us to understand: “This is at once a very old and a very new way of thinking about food: it suggests that all calories are not created equal and that the structure of food and how it is prepared may matter as much as its nutrient composition.”

Feed on that, folks — read more and learn more.