Farmers markets prove remarkably durable 

It’s farmers market time. I’ve washed and starched my reusable shopping bag and hope to be first in line to buy a fine lettuce that reliably voted for the Green Party until the day it was plucked from the soil and carefully strapped with a seat belt into the pickup for the trip to Springfield. It is a deeply satisfying ritual, this buying fresh produce from the calloused hands of the men and women who grew it. Even if those of us who perform it behave as Americans do as a whole and end up throwing away half of the fresh food we buy, we do so content that our garbage will not contaminate local landfills.

The two-day-a-week Old Capitol Farmers Market downtown will open on May 13 for nigh onto the 20th time. That event has been described as the oldest farmers market in Springfield, but in fact it is only the oldest now operating. For example, such a market was a regular presence on the Old State Capitol’s south plaza in the 1980s; however much the public’s diet was improved by it, the plaza was wrecked by the vendors’ trucks and had to be rebuilt, which is why today’s Old Capitol Farmers Market is on Adams Street.

In early Springfield, of course, whatever fresh food you didn’t grow yourself had to be bought from local growers. Gathering places for these exchanges were set aside in every town and city as a public amenity. (Rare is the city that doesn’t have a Market Street in its center, as Taylorville does; Springfield’s Capitol Avenue was originally Market Street.) In the more evolved cities, markets were held not in the streets but in permanent structures built for the purpose by the town and regulated by it to ensure than the foodstuffs on offer met minimum (very minimum in today’s terms) standards.

The oldest market in Springfield was held in a building erected for the purpose on the square in 1832. Paul Angle reminds us that a larger market house was built in 1843 on, or rather in Sixth Street between Washington and Jefferson, the street being widened 10 feet on either side to accommodate it. The city claimed a monopoly for the city by banning sales of produce from the backs of wagons anywhere except the Market House. There, on certain days of the week, area farmers brought and townspeople bought. Fair weights and measures were promised, hours were set and sellers were warned to not leave manure and spoiled melons lying about.

Other market houses were built in the 1860s but their era was nearly over even then. Eventually supermarkets would offer centralized food shopping and, thanks to progressive reforms, unseen government minions kept the butcher’s thumb off the scales and ensured that a pound on the label was a pound in the bag. Thus was honest commerce of the sort envisioned by the organizers of the first public market in the 1830s achieved, but in private, not public markets. As far as I know, the only one of the dozens of public market halls that survives in Illinois is Galena’s Old Market House, built in 1845 and restored as a visitor center.

Trading on the sustainable, the farmers market phenomenon itself has proven surprisingly sustainable. According to the ancient rules that govern such things, farmers markets is a fad that should have died out by now, like earth shoes or populist governors. Instead, they have grown in popularity to such an extent that national supermarket chains mimic the off-the-backof-the-wagon ambience of the market in their produce sections. As more buyers come, more growers show up to sell to them; the Old Capitol market has signed up more than 60 vendors this season.

Yes, it’s fresh and it’s good (if also inconvenient and often expensive). I’m all for it if only because these markets offer expanded scope for local entrepreneurs. But these traveling tent shows can resemble revivals. Evangelists for locally grown food promise salvation in the form of a healthier body, a healthier planet and a healthier local economy. None of these claims is exactly untrue (which is more than you can say about the claims made for industrial foods) but none is as wonderfully true as believers think they are, and the rest of us wish they might be. For example, in spite of innovations like making it possible for people to buy foodstuffs using SNAP benefits cards, farmers markets are irrelevant to the pernicious problems of foodrelated ill health among our people.

Wrapping a fun outing in noble purpose does no harm, but I suspect that improving the world matters less to shoppers at farmers markets than improving their Saturdays. Going to the market has become a social experience, a sort of cage-free shopping, and they wouldn’t miss it. So mind your manners when you go; that doddering old man holding up the line in front of you might be me.

Contact James Krohe Jr. at [email protected].

Editor’s note

Gov. Bruce Rauner was front and center at the Lincoln funeral reenactment events last weekend, proclaiming his admiration for Abraham Lincoln and his ties to Springfi eld where, the governor said, Lincoln grew up. This is the governor who is proposing major funding cuts for state history programs and elimination of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. As one local historian points out in this issue (see Letters, p. 5), the success of the funeral reenactment shows that history and the Illinois economy are closely linked. Cutting the state’s already small history budget is shortsighted, especially by a governor who loves the Lincoln spotlight. –Fletcher Farrar, editor and publisher