Buying indie, eating locally

I was just reading the beginning of Bill Bryson's nostalgic new biography, and he reminisces about "the glory of living in a world still free of global chains. Every community was special and nowhere was like everywhere else." I hope Bryson got to walk around the city a bit when he was here last month to give a talk (his voice, fyi, is suprisingly high), because a bit of that glory remains.

Today I had wonderful food, and I didn't have to enter a single chain store. Nor did I have to go out of my way. I picked up a chunk of pecorino fresca and a loaf of ciabatta at the market a few blocks away, fresh tomatoes a block from there, and went home to make a sandwich. On my way to campus I grabbed a chai latte at an indepedent coffee shop/art gallery. Then, for dinner, I ate at White Dog Cafe, a restaurant that specializes in locally produced goods, with a group of alums from my high school.

As I've mentioned in an earlier post, Slow Food is a big deal lately, and Philly is a great place for it. There's a group here that helps people find locally-grown food, plus a website with a similar purpose called Farm to Philly. There also seem to be farmer's markets all the time, including one on campus.

I've also found it pretty easy to find independent places (more likely to have local products, and better for the community to begin with) here; they predominate in my neighborhood. It's not the 1950s, but hey, I'm quite happy to have a Trader Joe's near by, too.

To Market, To Market

This Saturday, I visited DC's Eastern Market. It was perfect weather for a walk around Capitol Hill and a morning of shopping outdoors. I wanted to make sure to visit this month, though, because the market has been suffering since its historic 1873 building had a terrible fire on April 30th. It's one of the places in DC that I'll miss most when I move.

Going to a public market has an appeal to it that a shopping mall will never capture. In some markets, being outdoors is one part of the allure, but so is interacting directly with the people who make, grow, or at least select their own merchandise. It also feels like a bit of a step back in time, since people have been selling goods this way for centuries.

Two of my favorite places from past visits to Philly are historic public markets. The city's Italian market claims to be "the oldest and largest working outdoor market in the United States," and I'm excited to be able to go there more often. Reading Terminal Market is a bit closer to where I'll be living and is historic in its own right; it apparently evolved out of an outdoor mess of stalls along what became Market Street.

I discovered that a fellow GW American Studies program alum has published a book called Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America that explores how markets were key to the development of shared community values. The book focuses on New York and Philadelphia, but I think the recent fire at Eastern Market has demonstrated how central the space was to the community here in DC.

The community isn't just about the people that come to the markets; it's about the vendors interacting with their customers. The Slow Food movement (part of which is focused on buying local) calls this "linking producers and co-producers." I think I'll go eat some of the cherries I "co-produced" right now, in fact.