Phyllis’ Blog

Grandma Neff made sugar cookies to sell at our local farmers market.

My first real job was Friday evening after school at the Fulton Farmers Market and Saturday morning at the West End Farmers Market. (Lancaster had five farmers markets scattered around the city.)

When Merle and I moved back to Lancaster after finishing grad school, we wanted to live downtown. One of our stipulations while we house-hunted? That we live within walking distance to Central Market, probably more for nostalgic reasons than anything else.

We found the right house, and a few years later, I would load both our daughters into the express wagon late on Tuesday or Friday mornings, and we’d head for Central Market.

Market was just a part of life-one of those riches you assume when you don’t know any better.

At about that time, Lancaster’s center city found itself faced with a classic fight to keep its downtown alive after a mega-mall was built about four miles away on farmland. Enough city buildings lost their tenants to worry us, but one of the bright lights that never moved or got replaced was Central Market. Now, we suspect that it has been one of the more enduring and sturdier features that kept our downtown from caving in completely.

I gotta admit that I didn’t foresee our local farmers markets as some peculiar treasure when I was a kid putting raisins on Grandma’s sugar cookies and my younger brother was painting the egg wash on her molasses cookies.

And my weekend market job was simply a start on my way to financial independence. On summer evenings, when things wound down at the meat/cheese/deli stand where I worked, we would hold knives, points-down, three feet above the flies walking unsuspectingly on the wooden platform we all stood on behind the refrigerated case. These houseflies had wedged into the building when customers pulled open its outer doors.

We held contests to see who was fast and stealthy enough to spear a fly, just before we began our clean-up regimen in advance of closing. The only other suspense in the evening was betting when to wash the meat slicer. Start too soon, and a breathless customer would inevitably rush up to order a pound of thinly sliced corned beef. Wait too long, and you’d still be there with your hot soapy water and too-many-square-feet of case yet to clean as the market master started snapping off the building’s lights.

Saturday morning market was no more enchanting. What do I remember? My dad quizzing me about the prices of each and everything we sold (for some reason the food wasn’t labeled with its prices) as he drove me through dark, empty streets. I recall angling to be picked up right at the market door at the end of the day, rather than having to take the bus home. And wondering if any regular customers would ask to have me wait on them (as happened with the best of my co-workers). And also wolfing down a full quart of chocolate ice cream-my lunch-while cleaning the stand after the customers were all gone.

Only when I switched from seller-on-market to shopper-on-market did I begin to catch on to the wonder of the set-up. And probably at first, it was primarily because market days provided an excuse for an excursion out of the house with two wiry-and usually hungry-little girls.

I plunked the two little bodies into the wagon, put the four wooden sides into place, and nestled in the market basket, stocked with a damp cloth for wiping sticky fingers; plates, spoons, and cups for serving lunch; and a paring knife (well protected, of course) for cutting up the fresh fruit and cheese we’d buy.

We’d head first to the stand where I used to work, and where the owner offered a slice of cheese to all little people. Then we’d do the shopping and end up in the pocket park across the street for lunch and a stretch at the two-story-high fountain.

And then I began to fall in love. Responsible for our family grocery-shopping, I started not only to see the difference between shopping at a supermarket and our local farmers market, I also began to feel the difference.

At Central Market, I pay the hands that dug the potatoes and mixed the cookie dough and cubed the squash. At the flower stand I buy quince branches from a woman who used to take naps under the counter when she was a baby and her grandma and mom were running the stand. And down the aisle, I fill up on asparagus from a truck farmer whose grandparents started the stand, and whose mom and dad still help to operate it.

When you shop at our local farmers market, you are connected straight away to soil and to generations of farmers and butchers and cooks.

It took me a while to catch on because I was too close. And when I was a kid, most families in my world had gardens and made soup and pies from scratch, and some even baked their own bread. Now, with the world having crowded out many of those routines, a good farmers market-where the standholders make or prepare what they sell, or are only one step removed from their suppliers-grounds our bodies and our souls. The market puts us in touch with roots and the local.

In Lancaster, Central Market used to be open only on Tuesdays and Fridays. That schedule allowed standholders to prepare on Monday for Tuesday’s market, and then on Wednesday and Thursday for the greater demand of Friday’s market at the edge of the weekend.

Some years ago, business dwindled in the four outlying neighborhood markets, and they eventually closed. Central Market then opened on Saturdays, attracting many of the other markets’ customers. But quite a few truck farmers and bakers can’t handle the preparation for two successive days on market, and so they continue the traditional schedule of being open only on Tuesdays and Fridays. And their customers adapt to these understandably human limitations.

I’m watching the age of Central Market’s standholders these days. We’ve got lots of young shoppers. But will we have enough committed, hardworking, out-in-the-sun, still-in-the-kitchen farmers, butchers, bakers, and cooks to keep the market filled with life for as long as we can imagine?

Our job is to keep on shopping and spreading the word about the jewels in our local farmers markets. And to try the surprises that we find there-the parsnips, and the farmers cheese with dill, and the turkey cutlets, and the 5″ and the 9″ lemon sponge pies, and the home-canned sugar-free applesauce, and the chicken corn soup. I’m beginning to believe that once you start-and as you share the goodies with your kids and your neighbors-you, and they, won’t quit.

This is more than fashionable. This is the future.