Once upon a time in this country, you knew where your food came from. Nowadays you just know which corporate chain box store it came from.
There's exceptions to the rule of course, and one of those is the South End Community Market here in town. Every Saturday morning in summer, Iroquois Park is the place to be, with community businesses selling local products.
Headed there this morning and was pleasantly surprised at what I found. This is the second year of the market and today there was a good number of vendors packed in and plenty of folks perusing their wares.
It was rather nice to see, most seemed to be 'doing this out of my house' scale operations, but that just made for more options to choose from when it came to bread and baked goods, honey, or fresh fruits and veggies.
Come for the neighborhood bakehouse bread, stay for the live music. Think I saw arts & crafts and plants for sale too. Don't know if you could get everything you'd need for a week's menu but you could definitely take care of most of it.
Half the fun was getting it from your neighbors. We're already part of a farmshare (CSA), so produce wasn't on my list but it all looked very tempting.
Still not sure why we've put up with the homogony of the box stores for as long as we have. If we can get more things like this going we can cut out the middlemen and their shareholders entirely. Until then, I'll be doing my best to get my groceries in the park.
