farmers market, high food prices, good food

I have been buying less at my Saturday farmers market. Berkeley's farmers markets seem to price based on the theory of charging whatever the market will bear. The farmers markets in tourist-mobbed San Francisco sell local, organic foods for significantly less than the Berkeley markets.  And the vendors here, in Berkeley, seem to be dissociated from pricing reality. There have been many times that a vendor assured me her price was lower than anywhere else; I hold my tongue on such occasions because I pay close attention to food costs and they are very high at the Berkeley market.

Berkeley has a couple beyond-awesome locally owned, large grocery stores that sell awesome, and awesomely priced, organic food. It's not all local but where everything comes from is posted.

So why do I still go to my nearby market? Because there are a few things I can't get anywhere else. At least no where that I know about.

White mulberries were today's best score. These white mulberries are long. Very fragile. And priced at $7 for a tiny basket of, maybe, four ounces (I think it is less ounces).  If there are white mulberries again next week, that will be it for the year. White mulberries are a fastly fleeting bit of magic.

Black wild mulberries are another rarity that appears once or twice each spring. I bought some wild black ones last Saturday.

When I was a child, I spent lots of time most summers on my cousin Joy's Indiana farm. Her parents farm.  Joy's mom was my mother's sister. Joy's dad was, I think, the oldest son in  very large farm family. His parents, Rosie and Lem, bought up small, adjacent farms to their original farm, to have more acres to grow food and grow income for their growing clan. Most such farms came with a farmhouse so scattered in a bit of a cluster, my uncle's siblings, the ones old enough to be married with kids, moved into the farmhouses that his parents, well, his whole clan, bought.

Joy had an aunt, my uncle's baby sister, named Maggie.  Maggie was a year younger than me.  I heard lots of jokes mixing up the word aunt with the child named Maggie.  Maggie did not have a farm. She was a child and lived with her parents, Rosie and Lem. And with Jane, Rosie and Lem's oldest daughter who had had polio and could not walk.

I do run on, eh?

The farmhouse Joy and her parents lived in with, more or less, kitty corner, separated by an interaction of a gravel road, from the grandparents (Rosie/Lem).  In the front yard of that farmhouse, but actually on what was, in practical life, the side yard because no one ever used the front door or side porch to come and go to that house. Everyone walked in off the gravel driveway next to the kitchen. So the 'front' yard felt like the back.

In that front yard was an old black mulberry tree. It was taller than the two story house. My aunt never went to windows in her house that overlooked the yard with the mulberry tree.

Joy and I would pick all the mulberries within our reach but we could not get up past, maybe, six feet. Seeing thousands of ripely perfect mulberries going up above the roof was so tantalizing.

Being a bit older, and having endless brothers who did things like I did on that farm, I had JOy and I haul out a ladder so we could teeringly climb to the top and pick more mulberries. We got away with it for a goodly while because no one saw us.

Once my aunt found out, and I still don't get what was wrong with picking mulberries on a ladder (one of us held it down to the other and I was always the one up on the ladder, not my aunt's precious daughter), my aunt showed us the most anger I had ever seen. Even now, I can't understand why she was so upset. And she was upset with me, who she always saw as the instigator of things we did that she decided were unacceptable.  She was kinda right. I was usually the instigator, at least with stuff. Joy was the one who dressed up Puff, her cat, in doll clothes but I got blamed for Puff in doll clothes.

I'm running out of gas and I have to get in my laps.  Story incomplete.

Quickly:  a few other must-buys that only show up at my farmers market for brief appearances: persimmons, both kinds, and dried persimmons, both kinds; great tamales that keep in the fridge -- they cost $9 for four at the market and $14 at one of our local grocery stores -- but the tamales are a year-round thing.  Today I bought a four-pack of spinach and mushroom tamales. Yes, they are all vegetarian. And have some vegan ones, as in no cheese.

Oh, I want to mention the $12 a quart almond milk. $48 a gallon.  I mostly drink almond milk these days, but I will happily use coconut. These commercially prepared non-dairy milks nearly all use carrageenan, a known carcinogen. The $12/quart organic almond milk is carcinogen free but wow on the price. Making almond milk is actually easy if one has a Vitamix. And that's what I do:  make almond milk from raw organic almonds. This is not quite cheap but it is much less costly than the $12/quart stuff.