Farmers markets are sprouting like wild flowers. With the combined impetus of the fresh food movement, and a desire to avoid the costs derived from shipping food long distances, the once quaint phenomenon of a farmers market is entering the main stream.
“I am getting about two requests a week to create a farmers market,” said Miriam Haas, director of Community Markets, headquartered in Ossining but operating 17 markets throughout Westchester and the New York metropolitan area.
A farmers market is different from a farm stand, which is also a growing phenomenon. A farm stand is often at the farm itself, while a farmers market is a movable feast in which regional farmers pick fresh produce and fruits, perhaps twirl some baked goods or jams out of their own harvest and then travel to sell the produce and goodies directly to customers at a once-weekly staging area, usually in the center of some town or city. The phenomenon is largely seasonal, as is the fare.
Haas opened the first farm market in Westchester in 1991 with two farmers coming to Ossining. “It was something unique in Westchester,” Haas said. “Now, everyone wants to set up a farmers market.”
The slogan of Community Markets is “Where the farm comes to you,” and there are now markets in Katonah, Lewisboro, Larchmont, Pelham, Pleasantville, Ossining, Rye and Tarrytown, as well as others scattered throughout New York City”™s boroughs.
There are also markets in the mid-Hudson Valley in New Paltz, Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park, Rhinebeck, Woodstock and Saugerties and Rosendale, to name at least some, most of which have sprung up in the last two years.
“There are real advantages to farm markets that are not found in supermarkets,” Haas said. “People like shopping outdoors, it”™s a social event; people like to meet their friends and neighbors there and they like the personal connection with the farmer. They get the sense the food is from a person not a corporation and the food is not traveling so far. And its really fresh produce. So the flavor is an advantage.”
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