table talk / By Stephanie Silvia

Locavores in the Big Apple

The Green Market at Union Square, N.Y.C.

(Sept. 3, 2009)  Living in the city — as in The City — one makes some of the same choices concerning the basic necessities as living in the country — as in Behind the Redwood Curtain. My dear friends Kathy and Lorenzo have lived in a one-bedroom apartment in New York City for 19 years. By sequestering the end of the living room with a partial wall, it became a two-bedroom after the birth of Lola. Why live in such a small space with a growing girl in tow? It’s rent-controlled, of course.

The high cost of living is the reason my family lives in a doublewide in Trinidad. My friends back east made jokes about living in a trailer, until they sobered up with descriptions of redwood trees I sleep beneath and the 15 minutes it takes to walk to the grand Pacific (dogs and all). Our home space is funky, for sure, yet with rents often comparable to Manhattan, this is how we get to live in paradise.

Produce stand at New York City’s Farmers Market. Photo by Chuck Gonzales

GALLERY >

After three years without a visit, my son Lonnie and I are in the Big Apple, ready to go buy apples at the Union Square Green Market, where I shopped for years before moving to Humboldt. It was here I was first introduced to the locavore movement that I cherish still, and remain part of by shopping at the Farmers’ Market on the Arcata Plaza.

In the midst of this bustling metropolis lies an oasis of freshness and fertility. An out-of-town visitor once delighted in my exuberance over the first harvest of late spring when I damn near threw a tam in the air a la Mary Tyler Moore amidst the intoxicating colors and scents in the otherwise concrete environment.

The bagels I purchased this morning, Lonnie sound asleep in Lola’s bed, were baked in the city — I wholeheartedly subscribe to the belief that NY bagels are the best because of the water — but where did the flour and cream cheese come from? I don’t know, but the walk down five flights of stairs and across Madison to Miss K’s Italian Deli felt darn local to me. I didn’t use a drop of fossil fuel to bring home our morning repast. So many features make local local — not purists, we do our best wherever we are.

At the Green Market, hot as the dickens out, Lonnie and I sampled luscious tomatoes, white and yellow peaches and nectarines, plums and berries of all persuasions. The Co-op would be ashamed: $3 a pint, 2 for $5. Not all the wares were certified organic, but all were local and pesticide-free. As Barbara Kingsolver in her Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, along with other champions of the locavore movement write, sometimes local food that has traveled less fossil-fueled miles, grown by small farmers who haven’t the means to become officially organic, is a healthier choice than certified organic produce that has been shipped from, let’s say, a corporate organic farm in California to a Brooklyn dinner table. (Does anyone really have faith in Safeway Organics?)

I was surprised and delighted to see many of the same vendors I shopped from years ago — Martin’s Pretzels from Lancaster, Penn.; Blue Moon Fish, selling local seafood; Bread Alone from Woodstock, with its abundant offerings of organic whole grain breads, boules, rustic pastries and cider donuts; Arlington Road Winery, the first New York state wine I ever tasted; and hand-pressed juices from Red Jacket Orchards out of Ontario County, N.Y. — Lonnie and I shared a splendid $3 quart of raspberry-grape to quench our thirst this muggy afternoon. The orchards, originally planted in 1917, are managed by the third generation of the Nicholson Family, who employ integrated pest management and are certified by the Food Alliance as a sustainable producer of plums, apricots and prunes.

Freshness, price and supporting a farmer you know were the reasons customers and vendors gave over and over when asked why the market is so successful. A young woman shopping at Race Farms Organics of Blairstown, N.J. proclaimed she couldn’t get this quality at this price at the Food Emporium in her neighborhood. Elly from Patches of Star Dairy in Nazareth, Penn., maker of goat cheese ice cream, insists, “People want to support local; they like to know who grew their food.”

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