True Love
Love festival season is upon us. We’ve got Valentine’s Day, Mardi Gras, lunar new year, and my personal favorite, Fastnacht Day, all happening in the coming week. But last week we were just trying to get by.
Last Sunday was cold. Not mildly irritating cold, but bone chilling, breakout the heaviest gear you got and add multiple packages of handwarmers and propane heater cold. When I got to the green garlic first thing in the morning, a staple in my midwinter diet, it was already frozen, the long thin emerald ribbons stiff to the touch. {Here’s a big hint to anyone who encounters frozen food that normally isn’t frozen at the farmers market. Take it home and cook it at once. That way it can be used as an ingredient in your meal planning throughout the week. Culinary staples like mirepoix are perfect for pre-cooking and even freezing once cooked for future use.}
Farmers have their own thermometers, the way they gauge just how darn miserable it is outside. “I’ve got two blankets over the greens and that’s under a low tunnel with a double layer of floating row cover inside of a high tunnel and everything in there is still frozen solid. I wouldn’t have much to sell even if there was a market last week.” Other farmers lamented the amount of fuel it was taking to keep their products live and growing in their greenhouses. I guarantee there was a lot of propane, natural gas, and oil burned to keep your food and flowers alive so they could eventually make it to market. It might be sunny during the day, but this is still winter, and the Earth remains much farther away from the heat of the sun to keep those plastic and glass buildings warm enough solely under solar power. Vendors have about as much control over the weather as we do over the Montgomery County school District deciding to close for inclement weather.
While the brutal winter weather is physically demanding and exhausting, the loss of two markets back-to-back is emotionally taxing. We all worry about our customers having enough as well as our cash flow. After all, every single one of us at market is a business which is exactly why many of us last Sunday bundled up as best we could and put our heads down against the winds that drove temperatures into the single digits prior to the delayed opening.
And then our customers arrived, restored our faith, and renewed our calling, especially one in particular. He could’ve been at the Olympics in Italy or at the Super Bowl in California given his globetrotting celebrity lifestyle. Instead, he was on the front lines in his own community, as always bringing relief and sustenance. He can layer up to the point of being incognito, but there is no hiding that Spanish accent, a familiar voice, always first thing in the morning when he’s in town and shopping at his neighborhood market. Sometimes he brings his family and friends, other times a wagon. There have been film crews with him for commercials, but mostly it’s Jose Andres and his iPhone for a quick social media video. This time his advice to his vast audience: support local farmers markets, no matter where they were in our country. Behind him came our usual throng of regulars ready to resupply after our two-week hiatus. Business kept us moving, but the winter chill continued to turn our abbreviated market into a less than enjoyable experience. That was until at the end of the day, when Jose returned with an enormous pot of white bean, vegetable and sausage soup which he carried around while dishing out large cups to all the vendors. On what was one of the most miserable days in all my years of going to farmers markets, this man came out, bought our products, went home, cooked, returned, and fed us.
Kurt Vonnegut once said, “You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.” On that I would also add an indecent environment. He often refers to himself as a simple cook, but last Sunday after standing in the sub freezing temperatures for 4+ hours, Jose was our saint. Those warm cups of soup brought the feeling back into our fingers and gave us the energy for the drive home and unloading. Who needs Valentines Day to feel loved. Not all superheroes carry swords with magical powers; some wield ladles full of hot soup.
According to the national retail Federation, this Valentine’s Day the U.S. is expected to spend a whopping $29 billion to show their love and I couldn’t help but think how many more people in disaster areas and war zones could Jose Andres feed if we donated a fraction of what we spend on Valentine’s Day to World Central Kitchen? A romantic Valentine’s Day dinner is out of the question this year for me anyway as it is the day prior to market, which is shaping up to be a busy one. Do we really need fresh roses flown in from South America? Consider saying I love you this year with a donation to World Central Kitchen.
That’s true love.