This Week at Smart Markets Bristow Farmers' Market

With so many new shoppers adding their names to our newsletter list over the last couple of months, I want to make sure that you know that we give back to Piney Branch Elementary School and to the community in a variety of ways.

Smart Markets is happy to share the commission fees that we collect from our farmers with the school, and we also work with the school PTO, the teachers, and Principal Janice Herritt on several initiatives that could bring grant money to the school. We are working now on plans for a school garden, which our farmers will graciously support with seedlings of all kinds next spring. Hopefully the market and the garden will be tied into other activities throughout the year that encourage healthy lifestyle choices and educate the children and their parents about their options.

We have also invited the House of Mercy to glean from our market at the end of each market day, and they are now sharing the bounty of the market with their Food Bank clients. We have also been working this summer with Ann Cimini at the House of Mercy to provide some of the canning classes we will be offering to a number of groups that Ann has recruited. The first class will be taught to home-schooling parents; then we hope to teach some of the Food Bank clients, and we will also teach Girl Scouts in the area, who will then be available to assist with some of the other classes.

We don’t toot our own horn often, but your support of our market enables us to do more than just provide you with a great selection every week of locally grown, raised or made products. We are busy even when you are not looking to share what we know and do what we can to improve not just your health but the health of your whole community. We thank you for this opportunity and for your support, which makes this possible.

See you at the market!

From the Market Master

The June issue of Smithsonian magazine featured a number of good articles about food and our appreciation of it. One article in particular reviewed the recent scientific study of how cooked food has helped the human brain develop and how it can aid our good health and good sense today.

Our bodies get much more out of the calories in cooked food than in raw food. A raw-food diet, which of course is also going to be a vegan diet, will contribute to weight loss but will also contribute to the loss of essential nutrients that our body needs to remain healthy over a long life. (Raw fruit is healthy, however, because it evolved to feed animals.) There seems to be a correlation between the discovery of fire, its use to cook food, the subsequent transition to meat-eating, and the growth of the brain as humans evolved. As Adler concludes, “The great apes spent four to seven hours a day just chewing, not an activity that prioritizes the intellect.”

There was also an interesting article about how we develop likes and dislikes for foods. And there’s a discussion between Ruth Reichl and Michael Pollan. Reichl recalled her decision as the last editor of Gourmet magazine to run a story about tomato farming in Florida. It caused tremendous angst among editorial staffers but also led to changes in Florida law that had permitted virtual slavery in the tomato fields.

We need to see more of that kind of journalism, and more of Pollan and others, online and disseminated via social media. How else will our young people catch on to the “food revolution?” Jamie Oliver makes good use of technology, but we are going to need more apostles and more of them using social media. One great article will not make a ripple without more stones being thrown into the water by lots of us standing on shore.

Photo by Sarah Sertic