I’m eth­ni­cally Chi­nese (mostly, any­way), so cul­tur­ally speak­ing, eat­ing is what I’m sup­posed to do best after play­ing the piano and tak­ing SAT prep classes. And since my piano career was cut short due to never want­ing to prac­tice and SAT prep just wasn’t my thing (because my test-taking skills stunk), I tended to focus on the eat­ing part, which I really excelled at. So, I make my par­ents proud, I think.

Due to my mag­nif­i­cent eat­ing prowess, I’ve always known what it meant to eat plen­ti­fully and gen­er­ously, though I hadn’t always been keen about eat­ing whole­somely and health­fully. Thank­fully my mother got pretty down with the Cal­i­for­nia nat­ural foods move­ment early in the 90’s, and my fam­ily would occa­sion­ally splurge on a farm­ers’ mar­ket pur­chase every now and again. Shop­ping and eat­ing these fruits and veg­eta­bles made it eas­ier to see the ben­e­fits of eat­ing more sus­tain­ably, some­thing that has become a national trend in the last decade.

Now that my par­ents are older, wiser, and frankly, richer than they were twenty years ago, these farm­ers mar­ket pur­chases are more of a weekly habit rather than monthly splurge. When­ever I go home to visit, I’ll accom­pany my par­ents on a trip to our local farm­ers’ mar­ket at West Val­ley Junior Col­lege. Now, I love see­ing mar­kets all across the world- you prob­a­bly gained that through some of the entries on this blog through­out my time in China and beyond. But there’s really noth­ing that beats being home at summer’s peak, when there are buck­ets of blue­ber­ries, bushels of corn, and a bonanza of peaches, ripe and sweet in all their glo­ries, just wait­ing to be pur­chased on a Sat­ur­day morn­ing in sunny yet tem­per­ate North­ern Cal­i­for­nia. I know that was a long, run-on sen­tence, but it just had to be.

Plus when you throw in a freshly baked almond brioche, that’s the def­i­n­i­tion of #win­ning.

There’s been a clear and con­scious lean towards eat­ing health­ier, more organic, and more local in the last twenty years. I’m happy to find that most of Amer­ica is trend­ing towards the direc­tion of good food- away from the super­mar­ket hey­day and frozen food nov­el­ties of the 50’s and 60’s. (I guess when I say most of Amer­ica, it might just be coastal Amer­ica, but that’s all I’ve ever known. You can feel free to leave me nasty com­ments about this pre­sump­tion, below.)

The main rea­son for my wax­ing poetic about going home to the mar­ket was to share with you this recent arti­cle from The Atlantic, which empha­sizes the USDA’s sup­port for local agri­cul­ture and farms. Because the bet­ter the local sys­tems, the bet­ter your local econ­omy. Sup­port your home­town farm­ers today (or, this weekend)!!

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