Last weekend when I was in New York I got to visit a winter farmers’ market for the first time in my life. I’m a Californian through and through–and I don’t say that in a prideful way. I only mean that I’ve just been exposed to very little else. I didn’t think too much about the experience at the time, but that visit has really stayed with me.
I don’t have any photos because the ones I took were on Snapchat, where they were meant to disappear immediately upon viewing. In other words, I had no intention of holding on to the memories. Instead, here is a photo I snapped on a walk to the train one morning. I believe I took this photo on a day when it was a balmy 19F. After a brutal couple days when temperatures never topped 12F, those extra 7 degrees made a whole lot of difference. Why didn’t I spend the extra $3 for the smartphone-touchable gloves at Target? is the question I berated myself with all week long, as my fingers hardened into a frozen claw every time I needed to look at my phone for directions.
Anyway, the farmers market. I found myself there after lovely Valentine’s brunch with M. I walked up and down the dozen or so assembled stalls to take it all in, and started chuckling. Compared to your average Los Angeles farmers market, it looked like a post-apocalyptic open air grocery. First of all, it was straight up frigid. A woman was walking around in one of those puffy insulated overall snow suits, and even she still looked cold. I myself was wearing just about every kind of fabric in my closet–denim, cotton, wool, down, polyester–and still couldn’t get warm. It was gray. It was windy. What were any of us doing outdoors?
And then there were the vegetables. Most of the vendors sold baked goods, pickled things, coffee, eggs. There were just four stands with fresh produce, and three of them sold only apples. Crates and crates of apples. The fourth sold root vegetables (carrots, potatoes, onions, turnips), and bunches of wilted, frozen kale that looked like they’d been run over by a truck. Oh, and more apples.
It wasn’t too hard to imagine some zombie takeover inching in out of the corner of my eye, or a fight breaking out over the last loaf of bread,
or people exchanging apocalypse-shekels for their foodstuffs.
In LA, where farmers markets are so plentiful, and where the produce spread year round is out of some technicolor dream, that Brooklyn farmers market left me utterly deflated. I snapped some photos and made snobby fun of it with friends. It’s an easy dig to make, just like when people say you’ve got to go out of your way not to get fed a vegan taco in SF (try harder guys).
But you know what I wasn’t expecting? I felt for that kale. It was so cold out, how was anything supposed to grow at all? Of course it’d come up out of the earth yellowed and weakened. It didn’t belong out there, on that sad table. Of course, none of us belonged out there. Kale compassion–that is what I took away from my visit. This and I love you forever LA.