Fermenting at the Farmers' Market
In Julia Skinner’s book Our Fermented Lives, which explores the inextricable history between the development of human culture and community with fermented foods, she echoes and expands on Sandor Katz’ view that, at our most basic form, we—our lives—are fermented. In his foreword to Our Fermented Lives, he writes, “From the very beginning, in our deepest evolutionary past, the earliest life-forms were fermentative,” referring to the bacteria that first gave way to what we are now.
Fermenting foods is an act of preservation. Historically, humans have salted and brined food as a way to use what was abundantly available at a certain point in time, preserving it for eating during slower growing seasons, or simply so that food wouldn’t go to waste (pickling watermelon rind is a good example of this). The centrality of fermentation to some of our earliest modes of eating and drinking shows how necessary a method of food treatment it is to existence itself. I love this line of thinking: That fermented foods are much more than simply jars in a cupboard, but as fundamental to our foodways, to how we have historically connected with our environment and to each other. It’s meaningful to remember, too, that the relationship between fermented foods and the humans who make and consume and share them is one of exchange: The foods themselves are enriching to our lives and our health, and they are also products of their environments, reflective of where they were grown or raised and then again where they were fermented, where they were introduced to place-specific bacteria.
Of course, fermentation is, immediately, a biological concept of transformative bacterial processes. But how can we think of it as a social concept, too? I like to think that a society or community that enriches the individuals who are part of it has fermentative qualities: Ideally, such a community is sustainably enlivening, preservational, and regenerative.
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The Dane County Farmers’ Market, the farmers’ market that I have had primary access to for the better part of 12 years, recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. It has grown significantly since it first began in 1972 when five farmers showed up on a Saturday morning to sell what they had grown; today, it’s the largest producer-only farmers’ market in the United States (friends from out of town have referred to it as “the circus of farmers’ markets,” and they’re not wrong). Every Saturday, farmers and producers line the half-mile stretch of sidewalk circling the State Capitol building to sell vegetables, fruit, meat, cheese, and baked goods, all grown and produced in Wisconsin.
How the Dane County Farmers’ Market became so big has to do with a few factors. It was committed to and invested in by the City of Madison in 1972. As it grew and changed with its growth, it evolved into a cooperative model, with the producer-vendors being members who have a voice in the direction and organization of the market. Madison is well-situated to bridge urban and rural communities through food, sitting on the eastern boundary of the region known as the Driftless Area for being uniquely unglaciated, or without glacial drift, during the last ice age, which flattened much of the Midwest. This region is full of hills and valleys, and while it’s home to many small farms, the landscape isn’t tenable for large-scale, industrialized agriculture. Small towns with strong communities built around food and culture, which serve the people who are part of those communities as much as the communities steward the land, dot Southwestern Wisconsin.
The Dane County Farmers’ Market grew throughout the 1970s alongside other developments in the city that both ameliorated food access and helped to mold Madison into a city that would turn into a destination for food. In 1974, a group of people started the Willy Street Co-op out of interest in providing fresh, local, organic food for their families. Madison’s premiere fine dining restaurant, L’Etoile, opened in 1976, with Odessa Piper’s (something of a Midwestern Alice Waters) vision to serve dishes focused on locality and seasonality. How Madison’s food scene came to be feels like a natural reflection of its geographic location and the era during which it began to burgeon. Who it serves is an issue continually in question. There are strong initiatives and good work being done to make access to fresh, local food more equitable to populations beyond the white, upper-middle class residents who have had dominant resource access. Today, there are farmers’ markets in just about every pocket of the city, where shoppers can use food stamps to purchase food products; discounts are available at the Willy Street Co-op for shoppers who are on the State’s medicare system; there are vibrant community gardens in areas of the city that have been historically disenfranchised. These all amount to a step in the right direction to creating a rich, enlivening, more just society. Food is crucial to doing so at all.
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In Our Fermented Lives, Julia Skinner writes, “Cookbooks give us a small window through which to view the culinary landscape of time and place.” To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Dane County Farmers’ Market, a cookbook of community-contributed recipes was created. The beauty of community cookbooks is that they show what is being cooked in everyday home kitchens, perhaps recipes that have been passed down within a family or shared between friends, recipes that have become a core part of a person’s or a family’s culinary repertoire. I submitted a recipe, which ended up in the cookbook, for a roasted sweet potato tomato sauce. Recipe contributors include market vendors eager to share with people how their produce, meat, or cheese can be used, some local chefs, and many market customers who have deep connections to the farmers’ market.
I began going to the market regularly when I was a senior in college, living a five-minute walk away from the Capitol Square. It was then that I began to think more carefully about what produce I ate during which season; having access to a farmers’ market was a critical guide for me. I had friendships strengthen, too, during Saturday morning strolls to procure vegetables, talk about our lives, then maybe cook breakfast together, and talk about our lives more. After finishing my master’s degree in library science, feeling adrift in a job that wasn’t providing me with much meaning, I found new meaning in the farmers’ market, though this time, as a day-of-market assistant, answering customers’ questions about vendors, and processing SNAP transactions for use at the market. The day we got married, my husband and I walked to the farmers’ market to pick out my bouquet. Getting to know farmers’ market vendors helped catalyze my career change from research support to baking, where every day, I connect to the local landscape through the flour and butter I work with.
I submitted a recipe out of gratitude for the many varied ways that the Dane County Farmers’ Market shaped who I am — in the kitchen, and as a community member. Like with fermenting, I hope that as much of an impression that that farmers’ market made on me, that I have left a trace of myself in it somewhere along the way.
