A few weeks ago, I went to a market in a small town where I saw something that saddened me – farmers re-selling products from warmer-climate states (i.e. Florida, Georgia, California) “because people want their” fill-in-the-not-in-season-yet blank.  Out-of-state tomatoes, peaches, blueberries, squash, beans, and potatoes were all for sale by local farmers who displayed these produce interlopers side-by-side with their own grown zucchinis, shelled peas, onions, ‘creamer’ potatoes, and asparagus.

This on a day where the sky threatened and eventually opened to pour rain yet again, making this one of the wettest planting and early harvesting seasons on record. A spring season which left flooded fields and Maryland crops like sweet strawberries swollen and succulent beets anemic in its wake.

Perhaps the weather was overwhelming me, but the fact still remains: we as consumers are not asking farmers the right questions.Rather than “where are my ripe peaches in May?” we should be asking “what local fruit is ripe this week?”  It breaks my heart to know that in responding to customers’ demands farmers feel that they have to resort to re-selling non-local produce bought with their hard-earned money at auction or wholesale in order to make a decent living.  What does it say for our national education systems that people have lost the connection to knowing not only what is in season, but what crops can grow in the region?

Although I’m no angel myself as I do not always eat entirely locally, as I learn more and more about the chain that brings us food from the southern hemisphere or the opposite coast it has become harder and harder for me to eat out of season.  I find myself thinking about all of the other seasonal foods that I would be foregoing if I were to just give in to the impulse buy from that great fruit display at the grocery store.  Or feeling guilty that the money I’m giving to enormous producers in California could be going (without the overhead and supermarket markup) directly to those young farming couples that have just started growing and are in our local farmers market.

And I also find the need to tell everyone about what is in season – what you can get locally now that used to be much harder to find.  As grocery stores return to dealing directly with producers and (at least a little) less through distribution companies the pendulum seems to be swinging back.  I don’t mean to oversimplify – I am fully aware that a return to the idealized small-town local economy idyll of our grandparents’ time is neither possible nor realistic.  But there has to be a better way than re-sale.