Julie and I recently spent a day in the Ferry Market in San Fransisco. It's a large farmer's market sponsored by an organization called the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture. I went a whole sentence without a cheap joke about being in a Ferry Market in San Fransisco. That's what passes for self control when you are me.
Anyway, a day perusing our future as farmers was fun. The Ferry Market is a scene, a show, a happening, a stage for marketing $8.99 a pound hamburger, $6.99 a pound baked beans, and $5 organic hotdogs. Also a $22 pear galette, whatever that is.
It's all worth it, because every farmer there produces his wares in a sustainable manner, and locally, as well. Each individual stall gave the history of the farm, his or her sustainable bonafides, and of course, the distance from San Fransisco. Must keep track of those food miles, you know.
We "industrial" farmers stink compared to the sales jobs taking place at Ferry Market. As my wife remarked, we weren't shoppers - well, we wouldn't have been shoppers even if we had been shopping rather than gawking - but instead, we were extras in a movie. The crowd was happy, the cash registers were ringing, and everybody had their reusable cloth shopping bags over their arms.
Parody? The first farmer's stall we visited was owned by a guy named Che. It is, I must admit, a temptation to try to parody the place, but it would be impossible. With a jug of Roundup or, worse yet, a plastic shopping bag like they give you at Wal-Mart, you could have emptied that market faster than you could shout, 'earthquake.'
We were in California for a speaking engagement, and had spent the day before our visit to the Ferry Market touring farms in Butte County, California. Our friend Stacy attempted to describe agriculture in his county in a morning, which can't be done. We visited an almond huller, a walnut huller, a rice mill, and an olive oil press.
You can't spend much time in California without hearing about water, and we learned how they collect, distribute, generate power, water crops and reuse their water. Given what's going on in much of California with Delta smelts, salmon, Indian tribes, and the drought, I really kind of wondered how sustainable those local farms are, but sustainable is an expandable term, with a definition that has more to do with attitude than reality, and self congratulation than science.
California agriculture is a marvel, a wonder, and endlessly interesting to grain farmers from the Midwest. The walnut and almond trees march in rows for miles, neatly pruned, on perfect diagonals, and perfectly tended. The orchards last for decades, which means the cost in neighborly disdain for crooked rows is high. The olive trees, on the other hand, were less tidy, growing on the uplands on the eastern edge of the county.
Foo-foo oil Our olive farmer host was bottling olive oil the day we were there. Most of the oil was going into bottles with his farm's label, but he was also bottling some smaller bottles from one of his tree varieties, a tinted bottle with a designer label. He called it his foo-foo oil. Sure enough, the next morning, there it was in the Ferry Market.
By noon, the unidentifiable greens at the Ferry Market were looking a little wilted, refrigeration being unsustainable, one assumes. The blue cheese we sampled was wonderful, as was the smoked salmon (not farm raised, and no doubt captured by humane means.)
If I lived in San Fransisco, which is a thought I've never had before, I might shop in the Ferry Market. Once in a generation or so. I admire the ingenuity of the farmers there, and hope that they all succeed beyond their wildest dreams.
It all seems kind of, well, unsustainable, though, in any place but the urban core of one of the richest cities in the nation. San Fransisco has a population of 800,000 or so, and the Ferry Market has around 10,000 visitors per week. That seems like about the right percentage. A market niche that will be rich and valuable, but very limited