A Meditation on the Farmers Market

With crowds to navigate and numerous farm stands selling competing replicas of in-season produce, can an anxious person (me) enjoy the farmers market?

Last week I went to the farmers market and asked myself, do I actually enjoy this? It’s an activity shrouded in romance and leisure, a time to reflect on the gifts that nature gives. It’s a tote bag filled with fresh parsley, butternut squash and a bouquet of $35 flowers (which will start to wilt in two days flat). It’s an infinity mirror of farm stands that shape a stream of people who travel in unpredictable formations, eliciting, at least in me, a feeling of frozenness.

This week’s trip has given me perfectly textured apples (which went into a caramel apple galette, recipe coming later this week). I also found out that the market’s singular grape farmer doesn’t grow concord grapes because “no one likes concord grapes”. Tell that to the pie recipe I was going to make! Going to and thinking about the market has been a meditation on how much, or not, I’ve grown when it comes to practicing patience and giving others (and myself) grace.

One time I was in a check out line at the market in Union Square. This line had extended into the main pathway, a high-traffic area, where someone bristled past and said to me, “You know this is a walkway right?” I responded with, “You know this is a busy farmers market, right?” I’m not sure if they heard me but it gives me a tingle to imagine they did.

If I’d had more time to engage in a tête-à-tête with this fellow anxious human, I would have made the following point. There’s an implicit social contract whereby we’re all at the farmers market for a little whimsy; to allow ourselves the opportunity to meander, play, and fantasize. We get this in exchange for relinquishing the goal of efficiency, which, for better or worse, is my natural inclination.

Moving to New York unknowingly intensified this predilection in me. For instance, on a crowded sidewalk others become obstacles that you try to avoid in order to maximize speed. “Hey, I’m walking here!”— both a cliché and something I’ve actually heard people say (and maybe have said myself???). Age and countless hours of therapy have mellowed me slightly. It’s a continual process to move towards a state of calm and away from the rigidity of anxiety. I now absolutely hate rushing, or feeling rushed, whereas in the past I didn’t even notice what this was doing to my nervous system (oh, to be young again!). I see strollers, tourists, and absent-minded walkers less as obstacles and more as people who are doing their best in this life. However, being at the farmer’s market is, for me, a boss-level exercise in practicing “chillness”.

I want to stay in the romance, to fantasize about how these fruits and vegetables want to be transformed, presented and consumed. But I feel a pull towards decisiveness and efficiency which inexplicably seems to hold moral weight. I don’t want to be an added stress to an already chaotic environment. At the farmers market I’m caught between these two desires and end up in, what I suppose is, a freeze state where the only reasonable solution is to panic-buy something I don’t need. Like baby ginger. “You can chew on the stem of this, but don’t cook it. It’s free water,” the farmer says to me as I check out with a single root. “Oh, cool. That’s good to know”, I reply. He repeats his instructions verbatim and I’m not sure if there’s hidden meaning in what he’s telling me to do, so I repeat myself too. We’re caught in this loop until the payment goes through and I say, “Thanks for the tip!”

This sort of strange interaction is a perfect example of why I’ll always go to the farmers market. The cashier at Whole Foods isn’t going to tell me that I should chew on the stem of a baby ginger. I won’t learn that no one likes concord grapes or have a conversation with the only other person buying grapes who, it turns out, has been a loyal patron of this stand since 2015. Can an anxious person enjoy the farmers market? Hell yeah. Just go with the flow and, at the very least, buy some flowers.