This Week at the Smart Markets Bristow Farmers' Market

This Week at the Smart Markets Bristow Farmers' Market
Sunday 10:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Bristow Commons
Bristow Montessori School Parking Lot
9050 Devlin Rd.
Bristow, VA 20136
Map

Dear Shopper,

Max Tyson of Tyson Farms and Orchards is back with us, and he will have eggs again this week. Jose Montoya and Luis Gutierrez will have more strawberries, asparagus, early greens, sugar snap peas, snow peas, and more. Luiz had lovely-looking collard greens last week — I will have some recipes for you at our table.

If you came anytime after 12:30 p.m. last Sunday, you missed seeing Pablo and buying his Great Harvest breads. He promises to be better supplied this week and hopes to make it to the end of the market with product to spare.
That’s what happens when you are generous with your samples.

Uncle Roger will also return this week with a full range of his gluten-free and special-diet selections. I know he has been missed, but his real job took him away from us. We don’t begrudge him his real job, but we hope the next one is limited to a weekday schedule.

I also want to ask you again to please be patient with us while we work on our parking situation. I can’t ask you to come at a less-busy time, because we are busy the entire market. I can ask that you please take care getting in and out as we work on getting rid of the big hill of dirt in order to open up some parking. By July, we have been promised a lot in the big open space. Once the construction crews arrive to build the next building in the complex, they will create a parking lot for us. But in the meantime, if you know anyone who could use lots of great topsoil, please have them email me.

We are so happy to be in Bristow, and we thank you all once again for supporting the market through the winter. Wait until you see what we will be bringing you this summer!

See you at the market!

From the Market Master

I was so close. I thought this morning when I woke up and was staring into the writer’s abyss that we had gone a whole week with no bad news about our nutritional health or the commercial food industry’s lapses in judgment. But then I opened the Wall Street Journal and was reminded once again that we are not only losing the battle of the bulge, we are losing the war against the damage caused by our unhealthy eating habits. And as always in war, the children of the world suffer most from the collateral damage.

According to Ron Winslow’s April 29 story, children as young as 10 years old are contracting diabetes as a direct result of obesity, and recent studies have demonstrated that the drugs prescribed for the containment of the adult disease are not working in children. Early in the story, Winslow describes how this fact is “heightening worries about the fast-growing and largely preventable disease” — preventable being the key word here.

Stating the obvious, Dr. Phil Zeitler of Children’s Hospital Colorado said, “It would be much better if these kids didn’t get diabetes in the first place.” And Dr. David Allen at Wisconsin American Family Children’s Hospital also reminded us that “children 50 years ago did not avoid obesity and its complications by making healthy choices. They simply lived in a more active and less calorie-laden environment.” Surprise, surprise!

Even if you do not have children at home now, you may have grandchildren or see them on the horizon. You may know your neighbor’s children. You may at least be aware of children who are out there somewhere hopefully running around a little bit — all needing the grown-ups to change that environment for them. And we cannot blame just the parents; most of the choices out there are not good ones. It is harder and harder to find them in a grocery store crammed with prepackaged foods that are cost-attractive and nutrition-deprived.

Help is on the way, but only if we take on a little of the burden ourselves. Jamie Oliver is still going strong working to create and nurture the food revolution worldwide, and check out what the Senate did for the small farmer and farmers’ markets. But this is a project that needs a real grass-roots effort, kind of like the old No Littering campaign of the ’50s and ’60s. It needs a repetitive, persistent drumbeat, or we are going to get sicker and sicker as a nation and be paying more and more in health costs for a preventable condition.

I am beginning to think that apart from my doing more to make our markets available for education and exposure, we can all become more involved in changing the nutrition environment in our schools by advocating for school lunches that offer only good choices and only real foods, by using only healthy foods as rewards, and by teaching nutrition and its relationship to preventive health to young people in every grade. We can all do this because this is our dime — this is our money that is paying for those unhealthy choices, that unhealthy environment, and that instructional curriculum that ignores one of the biggest threats to our nation’s future health.

It’s time to get crackin’! I’m channeling my mother again, but I think it would amaze her that we have come to this. I will provide you with some local names and contacts in my news newsletter for those who want to reach out and get involved.

In the meantime, continue to do the best for your own family, spend your $10 weekly on locally grown produce, and help keep our small farmers alive to sell more good choices to our school children, once we all figure out how to make that happen.