Make it a Smug visit to the farmers’ market

Some people treat a visit to the local FM like a trip to 7-11 that can be accomplished in a few minutes (aside from the thirty minutes you spend circling the parking lot, angrily stalking exiting Priuses, which does not tend to be part of the convenience store experience), but to make it a Smug experience, you need to plan on an hour so that you will have plenty of time for the following crucial practices:

  1. Eye the superior produce and local artisanal products (why buy the suspiciously beautiful and underpriced $6 three pack of strawberries when you might come across the misshapen organic strawberries for $12?).
  2. Interrogate the farmers about their location (because you saw that NBC “undercover” investigation about produce traveling from too far away [i.e. Mexico] and being described “illegally” as local).
  3.  Boast to the farmers about how you always eat the beet greens and other things “ignorant” people refuse (extra points if you can honestly admit to eating carrot tops).
  4. In fact, offer to take someone else’s abandoned beet, radish, or carrot greens and state casually: “Oh, these are just delicious.  You just need to sauté them with organic Californian olive oil and heirloom garlic.”
  5. And one step beyond number 4 is to “rescue” produce that has fallen to the ground.  That carrot under the table, that cherry tomato rolling across the street, that peach some clumsy moron dropped, that radish that was almost under your shoe…take them all.  This is farmers’ market Fruitarianism!  If anyone expresses shock that you picked something up off the pavement and plan to eat it, simply say: “If you are eating factory farmed meat, you are eating a much more contaminated product than an organic carrot I just happened to find on the ground.”
  6. Find the market organizers and complain that some stands still offer you a plastic bag (“I thought they were all banned!  It’s just disgraceful that a market in this part of town allows plastic!”).
  7. Plan how to stretch your $100 so you can get everything you “need” (if you didn’t know you needed Oaxacan “living food,” such as raw meatballs made with nuts, then you need to re-examine your priorities).
  8. You may not leave without buying flowers.  You may NOT.  Look for the wild looking flowers in a (hopefully repurposed) Mason jar that are much cheaper than all of the coarsely beautiful bouquets.  If your market is not Smug enough to have flowers in Mason jars, go for whatever looks kind of odd (read: ugly).  That way, when you have visitors, they will know that you didn’t purchase supermarket flowers that came to this country in a shipping container.

Here are some more tips to make your produce purchases more Smug:

  1. Look for the wildest and most unidentifiable looking greens.  If you think they look like the weeds growing near that abandoned, not-yet-reclaimed property or next to a concrete freeway divider, so much the better. If they look dirty and inedible, so much the better.  If you can’t imagine how they could possibly be part of any meal you would eat, that is precisely when you know they are the right ones.  Ask what they are and how to prepare them.  The answer will be something along the lines of “sauté them with organic Californian olive oil and heirloom garlic.”  Buy them.  Remember the name.  Announce on Facebook these are your new favorite greens even if it took you an hour and a bottle of wine to digest them.
  2. When you buy any bushy greens or tall bunches of herbs, make sure you hang them over the side of your reusable bag or hand-woven (probably by poor Haitians) basket.  As they say on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” be sure to “zhoozh” them so they fluff out at attention and show everyone that you buy overgrown greens but never suffocate the poor things in a plastic bag.
  3. Look for vegetables that come in “wrong” colors.  You want these.  Some examples are purple asparagus or Brussels sprouts or string beans, burgundy carrots, black or white radishes, green or yellow or purple cauliflower, yellow figs, and multi-colored, splotchy squash or bell peppers.
  4. Look for fruit and vegetables with obvious “deformities.” You want those tomatoes and eggplants with phallic protrusions.  You want those Siamese twin carrots. You want that summer squash that seems to have warts growing on it that would nauseate you on the flesh of a human. You want that corn with the resident worm gnawing away at the kernels (if the worm likes it, you know it’ll taste good, and if the worm didn’t die, you know it was grown without pesticides!).  You want all of these things because you know they would be too “ugly” for a supermarket.
  5. Look for anything with a long and complicated name.  For example, you may have thought you saw some ordinary hydroponic sprouts, but you know you have to have them when you find out they’re called Black Oil Sunflower Greens.

 

4 thoughts on “Make it a Smug visit to the farmers’ market

  1. I’m going to learn so much. I’m relieved that you began with a topic I’m familiar with. Wait, I’m relieved that you began with a topic with which I am familiar. This is my first blog comment and it is causing me anxiety. Causing me to be anxious?

  2. No need for anxiety, LMurph! Even the Smug Scout leaves prepositions dangling from time to time. And feel free to point out other familiar topics I might want to write about. After all, you live in a Smug Epicenter! Maybe you’d like to be a guest blogger!

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