The Santa Cruz Diaries - Farmers at the Market

Day 3:


I only have a few insights from today's experience. First is that we hate paying a lot of money for food, especially for organic or natural products. But the reality is that most of the world's poor spend about half of their income on food. While some of us may decide that we'd rather spend our money elsewhere, imagine how much food - organic, free range, natural, the best of the best - we could buy if we spent the same percentage of a middle class income on food. We need to get used to spending a higher percentage on our food if we ever expect to get ourselves out of this obesity and diabetes laden quagmire the nation seems to be in.


Secondly is that we went to the Santa Cruz farmers market today, and what surprised me the most compared to Charleston's market was the number of farmers! While I think it's well and good to promote and support local crafts, a farmers market should first and foremost be about produce and farm products. This isn't such a novel idea, is it? The second distinction that I saw was the amount of organic produce. Again, this shouldn't be so hard to achieve but the south just seems to be lagging so much on this front.


As I've learned throughout my time here at the Agroecology course, the transition to organic shouldn't simply be about the substitution of inputs or practices, but a complete redesign of the conventional monoculture model. You need diversity on a farm, and lots of it. When you have this, your farm will be more resilient on the whole in addition to the ecological benefits of promoting biodiversity.


Well I suppose I did have some food for thought from today after all. I challenge South Carolina to have farmers markets this robust in 5 years. It would be quite amazing to see agriculture so supported in a previously predominantly agricultural region.