The Farmers Market Season Opens This Week

Opening day of the Iowa City farmers market is my favorite Saturday of the year, and I do not say that lightly because I have a lot of favorite Saturdays. It is the one day where the whole town has agreed to show up at the same place and be outside and talk to each other, and that combination is rarer than it should be.

I go early. Not because I have to, but because the first hour is the only hour where the farmers are not tired yet, and you can ask them things. By ten they have been standing for three hours and they have answered the same question about forty times. At seven they still want to tell you.

What I Actually Buy First

I buy the thing that looks wrong. This is the whole trick and I have never once met a person who believed me the first time I said it. The ugly vegetables, the ones with a split or a curve or a spot, are the ones that taste like something. The perfect ones were bred to survive a truck ride and a display table, and those are the two things I do not need from a tomato that was picked this morning.

If a farmer has a box of seconds, that box is where the value is. It is the same food. It is priced like it is not, and it is the thing I take home and turn into sauce.

The Coffee Question

This is the part where I have to be careful, because I sell coffee now, and I am aware that saying I buy coffee at a farmers market sounds like a conflict of interest. It is not, and here is why: I buy coffee from the person who roasted it. The market is the only place in town where the person who made the thing is the person handing it to you, and that is worth something that has nothing to do with the beans.

What I am actually looking for at a market is not a product. It is information. I want to know what people are buying, what they are carrying it in, how far they drove, whether they came back. That is the real inventory.

The Rule I Keep

I bring cash in small bills and I bring my own bags, and I have learned that both of those things change the interaction entirely. Cash means the transaction takes four seconds. Bags mean I am not standing there holding a plastic sack while somebody explains their honey operation to me.

I also have a rule that I do not buy anything I can get in a grocery store. If it is in a grocery store it will be there on Tuesday. The market is for the thing that only exists on Saturday, and the thing that only exists on Saturday is usually the thing somebody drove two hours to bring.

Get there early, buy the ugly ones, and talk to the person who grew it. That is the entire strategy and it has not failed me once.

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC