Unchained in America

This is how I know we’ve changed over the last ten months of our experiment of not shopping or eating in chains.

Dan has been bugging me to go to Nashville on one of his rare weekend days off and we finally hit a day when we both didn’t have work commitments. Since I’ve been to Nashville many times, I said, “Go to their tourism website and decide what you want to do.” I figured we would end up at one or two museums like we always do. But guess what? Dan’s first choice was to go to their Farmers Market held downtown on Bicentennial Mall Park. Then, if we had time, we’d go to Andrew Jackson’s home, the Hermitage. Yep, that’s right. My husband and I, both museum people spending the day at the Farmers Market and IF we have time going to a historic house museum. Oh, the times they are a changing.

So off we drove on an overcast, chilly fall day north to Nashville. After a few wrong turns we finally found the Farmers Market that has nice, though not ample, on-site parking. We arrived pretty early thanks to the change from Eastern Standard to Central Standard Time. The Nashville Farmers Market was huge compared to our Chattanooga Farmers Market.

Our first order of business, however, was lunch! The food court at the farmers market had a lot of “fast food”-type vendors to choose from. Most of the vendors sold ethnic food. We had our pick of Indian, Cajun, Chinese, and, of course, Barbeque. Since reading Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, I am now a vegetarian when eating out. If I don’t know where the meat comes from, I’m not eating it thank you! So, while Dan opted for the Gyro plate, I had a Spinach pie plate, which really turned out to be tabouli in pita bread. Still, my meal was good.

Here’s what we purchased:

• Red Delicious apples
• A pumpkin
• Butter and egg noodles
• Pork
• Lamb
• Veggies

Red Delicious Apples

A simple stand that held a few baskets of Red Delicious apples caught our attention. The apples came from Stewart Orchard in Ashland City, TN, which is just outside of Nashville. Talk about buy local! Tatum, the farmer at the stand, told us that his booth was the only one selling apples grown locally in Tennessee. The other vendors were selling apples brought in from North Carolina and Georgia.

Mmmmm. North Carolina and Georgia. Tatum’s words helped us look a bit more closely at who the vendors were at the market and how difficult it can be sometimes to buy local produce at a Farmers Market. Some of the vendors were actually “resellers” and when we looked at their booths we saw they were some what like grocery stores selling vegetables! Just because your at a Farmers Market doesn’t mean it will be local! That was our first lesson of the day.

Pumpkins

Next on the list was the ever important pumpkin! I’d purchased one a few weeks ago at the Saturday Farmers Market in Cleveland on Peerless Road (no website), but it had rotted and we needed one for the impending holiday. The pumpkins from Swafford Farm caught our eye. They had over 60 varieties of pumpkins, in all shapes, sizes, and colors, that they raise on their Pikeville farm. Obviously, finding a pumpkin wasn’t going to be a problem! I ended up picking out 6 tiny ones for inside the house – 3 orange and 3 white – and one large one for the porch.

Butter and Egg Noodles

After a quick trip to the car to unload our heavy loot and to tick off the long line of drivers wanting our parking spot at the farmers market. (Sorry, you should have come earlier!) Then we headed back to buy more produce.

That’s when we hit pay dirt.

We noticed a nice young Amish couple who run Schrock Family Bakery. Unfortunately, we didn’t buy any of their mouth-watering pies. But we did buy a 1-pound tub of fresh butter and homemade noodles made from the eggs and wheat flour off their farm, which is located in Wildersville, TN. If you want to buy local noodles, you can’t get any more local ones then these. We have since tried them with a Ratatouille dish I made with the eggplant I bought. Yum! The noodles were so much better than store bought!

The butter I’ve also tried many times and its delish. It turns out, though, that the butter isn’t theirs, but comes from Rock Springs Dairy, which also is in Wildersville. So the butter is still locally made. The only ingredients in the butter are cream and salt.

For those of you who turn your noses up at eating real butter, we are now convinced it’s better for us than eating the processed margarine we were brought up on. We were led to believe eating margarine would help us “reduce” our weight and be more healthy — but it turns out it doesn’t. In fact, margarine is less healthy than butter.

You’re not convinced butter is better for you? Here’s just one of the many sites where you can read up on the new findings about the butter-vs.-margarine debate. The fact that even Dan, who has battled high cholesterol all his life, has switched a is major development. Now granted, we aren’t taking this butter and slathering it on everything in sight. We use it in moderation — though the taste of this butter sure makes it hard to do so!

Pork

On our next stop at the farmers market, we bought some pork. We had a great chat with Charles and Carla Scalf of Garrett Farms Beef in Cookeville, from whom we purchased chops and a roast.

But now it turns out that we learned another lesson about how to shop local and buy local. What’s the lesson? That we still haven’t learned to ask enough questions — or the right questions — about what it is we’re buying.

We bought pork chops and a pork shoulder from them. But while researching this blog, I found no evidence on their website or in their brochure that they don’t raise hogs. I emailed them to see what’s up and here’s their response. While it seems like it would be obvious that someone who is selling meat would have raised it, maybe not?

Thanks for your purchase. I hope you are enjoying your meat. We do not raise the pork on our farm. we do have someone else to raise our hogs for us. We do check the quality and do slaughter by our slaughter house and are as concerned about the quality as you are. We are very careful in who we get our meats from.

We were disappointed. We really have no idea how these pork were raised or by whom. We do know the Garret Farms people use R&D Slaughter House in Dunlap which is what all the small farmers use around here. But that’s all we know about this pork. We are now going to be way more thorough in our questions with producers we don’t know.

Lamb

Our next purchase at the farmers market I’m more sure and happy about. We bought lamb for lamb kabobs from Chigger Ridge Ranch. John and Debbie raise lamb and rabbits on their farm in a sustainable manner. When you buy local from them you know you’re buying truly local, grass fed meat.

John and Debbie’s website is great. It gives you the feeling that they know what they are doing with their animals and that they care deeply for them. I’m looking forward to the Middle Eastern dish that Dan will prepare with the lamb!

Veggies

Final stop – veggies. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the farmer we bought our veggies from, but we stocked up on eggplant, potatoes, tomatoes, and my new southern favorite – okra. Laden down we waddled to our car to free our space up for the next happy shopper.

It’s so much more fun to shop local and buy local at a Farmers Market than to shop in a grocery store.

With all produce in the trunk and the frozen meat packed up carefully in the cooler so it would stay frozen, we headed for a short visit to the Hermitage and then home.

By the way, while we were at the farmers market we picked up Nashville’s totally cool magazine, Local Table, which is devoted to local food. Oh, to live in a town so hip! The magazine’s web site is a great resource, an and you can enjoy the web site even if you don’t live near the Music City.

I hope you enjoyed our tour of the Nashville Farmers Market. Remember. Remember: Shop Local and Buy Local!

Tags: buy local, farmers market, grass fed meat, shop local

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.