Smart Markets Lorton Opens Thursday

This Week at the Smart Markets Lorton Farmers' Market
Thursday 3–6 p.m.
Workhouse Arts Center
9601 Ox Rd.
Lorton, VA 22079
Map

Dear Shopper,

We’re back! And we’re back earlier than most seasonal markets, and this year we hope to continue through the winter as a year-round market. For now we are happy to welcome back many familiar faces from last year and some new vendors, with even more expected later this spring.

We are thrilled that Heritage Farm and Kitchen, one of our most popular and respected vendors, will join us this week. This Mennonite co-op brings a wide variety of products including honey, jams, jellies, lots of winter produce, free-range pork and lamb, and Trickling Springs milk, ice cream, and country butter. Tyson Farms will also join us with local apples and winter produce.

The warm temperatures this winter have enabled our farmers to continue to pick kale, collards, mustard greens, arugula, chard, carrots, potatoes, turnips, beets, winter squash, and more. Even the broccoli is poking though the snow in West Virginia.

Look for your favorites too, including Celtic Pasties, Peruvian empanadas from Delicias del Sur, Italian pasta and sauces from Cavanna Pasta, and BBQ -- all produced in Virginia. Many of the baked goods at this market were actually produced in Lorton or very nearby, so you won’t find anything fresher than the breakfast pastries at Valley View or the cake pops from Kylie’s Pop Shop.

We encourage everyone to shop local all year round and learn to eat off the land rather than from the factory.

Please check out our Smart Market tent for St. Patrick’s Day recipes like this one from Jamie Oliver, for Bubble and Squeak. In Ireland, the dish is made with cabbage as the add-in, and it is called Colcannon. I am sure the Irish would enjoy it with sausages, too!

And look at what Celtic Pasties plans to bring to celebrate the holiday: Beef & Guinness, Cottage (Tochin) Pie Style, Chicken & Leek, Corned Beef, Mango Chicken, Cheese & Onion, and both Colcannon and Bangers and Mash.

From the Market Master

If you read this New York Times article, then you were no doubt as appalled as I was to learn, once again, more than we need to know about the stuff called “food” that is sold in the grocery store. The article was just an excerpt, and while the book is now available, I am not sure that I want to know any more.

The challenge for me, and for those of you who feel some responsibility as I do for getting the word out, is how to reach the masses with the news about unhealthy foods. I am especially concerned about those families who will not be reading the Times, buying a Michael Pollan book, or going to see a documentary about our food supply chain. What grass-roots effort will work in the disconnected suburbs where the unwealthy are not always part of the mainstream media audience?

These musings take me back to the first political campaign in this area that I worked on. An early hero of mine, Fairfax County Supervisor Herb Harris, was running for Congress in Northern Virginia against a Republican incumbent.

The amount of money spent was nothing compared to today’s campaigns, but Herb still had much less to spend than the incumbent. I managed the campaign in Prince William County, which was not expected to switch allegiance to the challenger, but we had a tremendous group of neighborhood volunteers who hand-delivered more than 50,000 pieces of literature door to door in a county of 140,000. And we carried the county for Herb -- not by much, but enough to help him win the election. I have never figured out why we can’t still do that; it was much cheaper and much less annoying that those phone calls and TV ads.

But back to today. How do we duplicate that effort with a campaign to educate the public about the importance of eating real food, whether purchased at a farmers’ market or a grocery store? I actually believe that most moms out there would change their buying habits and cooking routines to some extent if they knew what simple home cooking with real food would accomplish: healthier families all through their lives. I’m working on this and I am talking about it with our partners in the community, but I would love to hear from you.

You probably already shop at markets and know what brought you to them. How would you convey that to someone else? Group outreach might work best so that reinforcement would be built in. Reaching children is important. I am thinking that door-to-door “campaigning,” especially in areas where residents would be more concerned about the cost of their food, would be effective. What do you think? Let me know, because through Smart Markets, I can reach out to our friends and partners and make something happen. And I need some good ideas.

Thanks for reading.