My favorite farmers
market is the one held on Thursday mornings in Elberta, Michigan.
Though it’s open from May to October, I’ve only been there in the
summer, during family vacations; and just a couple of weeks ago, I made
my last visit of the season. Compared with, say, the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco, or the Union Square Greenmarket
in New York City, the market in Elberta might strike you as awfully
small and not very exotic—some two dozen or so vendors, that’s all,
most of them offering the same beautifully grown onions and corn and
carrots and beans that you can find in farmers markets all over the
country in August. Of course, there are specialty items, too—perfect
cherry pies, tender bulbs of baby ginger on long green stems, tiny
dark-chocolate-covered clusters of pumpkin seeds with cumin. Even the
wheat-free cookies are good, and when was the last time you praised a
wheat-free cookie? But the produce and the pies aren’t the only reasons
I’m going to miss this place. What’s really important about the Elberta
market is the backstory. Hence my new, end-of-summer vow: For the next
ten months, every time I read something about how impeccably produced
food is just a plaything of the rich and pretentious, I’m going to turn
the page with admirable calm and think about Michigan.

If there’s anyplace that ought to be immune from a California-style
food revolution, it’s Michigan. Long winters, high unemployment, an
economy that’s been staggering for years, no instantly recognizable
culinary culture—Berkeley it ain’t. But the truth is, Michigan farmers
raise the second-greatest variety of agricultural products in the
country, after California. Traditionally most of the fruits and
vegetables grown there have gone straight to giant food processors, but
that system isn’t working the way it used to, now that processors have
access to cheap produce from across the globe. So farmers are turning
to what’s called the fresh market—selling directly to grocers,
restaurateurs, and the public. The amounts sold locally are still
small, but the potential is immense. “We found that if Michigan tripled
the amounts sold in the fresh market, it could increase net farm income
by $164 million,” says Patty Cantrell, a senior policy specialist at
the Michigan Land Use Institute, who built a ten-county program in
northwest Michigan called Taste the Local Difference (TLD) to help farmers reach consumers and vice versa.

TLD has been remarkably successful, not only out front where the summer
people are benefiting along with everyone else—as with the Elberta
market—but deep in the community. An online wholesale marketplace, for
instance, connects farmers with schools, stores, and restaurants. The
school effort has been especially successful: 30 schools in this area
now have farm-to-school programs, and cafeterias are showcasing local
asparagus, honey, grapes, apples, pears, squash, and more. In Traverse
City, known as the Cherry Capital for the fruit that takes pride across
the region, there’s a cherry icon on the school-lunch menu next to each
local item. When the Frankfort-Elberta public schools introduced local
apples, the kids increased their consumption of the fruit from a single
bushel a week to five bushels. It turns out that huge, imported apples
with a hard, glossy veneer didn’t appeal to children any more than they
appeal to us pretentious food lovers.

Other initiatives in local production and marketing are underway as
well. “We need smaller-scale processing and transportation—it’s all
been scaled huge,” says Cantrell. “Farmers have to be able to
differentiate their lettuce from the huge mass of lettuce.” She likes
to tell the story of Shetler Dairy,
a longtime farm that was about to go out of business until it located
some 1920s-era bottling equipment in a barn and started selling its
non-homogenized, antibiotic-and-hormone-free milk under the dairy’s own
label. (Tagline: “Our cows aren’t on Drugs, But they are on Grass!”)
“Now they’re flourishing, and the family’s kids are all working in the
business,” Cantrell says.

Elitist? Well, a half-gallon of Shetler milk costs $3.79 at the Honor
Family Market in Honor, Michigan (population 299 as of the 2000
census). A half-gallon of regular milk is $2.59. If the only shoppers
interested in Shetler’s milk are the elitists of Honor—okay, throw in
the elitists of nearby Beulah, population 363—the dairy would not
appear to have a bright future. But according to Cantrell, “everyday
people” are buying it—as well as the cream, the chocolate and
strawberry milk, and the yogurt smoothies. I tasted a rich, tangy peach
yogurt smoothie (lowfat yogurt mixed with an organic peach purée) from
Shetler; and as far as I’m concerned, $3.59 for a pint of this amazing
substance is a bargain. It’s also a luxury, of course. But if you have
$3.59 in disposable income on hand at lunchtime, it’s hard to think of
a happier or more productive way to spend it. This region lost more
than a third of its medium-size farms in recent years, and small farms
are even more vulnerable. “Farmers are trying to make a profit,”
Cantrell points out. “And an organically grown carrot is a relatively
scarce item. We have to increase the supply, and increase the avenues
to market.”