This Week at Smart Markets Reston Farmers' Market

This Week at Our Reston Market 
Wednesday 3–7 p.m. 
12001 Sunrise Valley Dr. Map

Thank you for welcoming the Georgetown Barkery to the market last week; they will now be rotating with Fabbioli Cellars, so Celeste will be with us this week with a full selection of wine, jams and jellies, handmade soaps, local honey and her llama wool. And you thought Heritage Farm was the country store at the market.

The Taste of Local truck and its intrepid driver and cattle driver, Doug Linton, will be back. They missed us, I hear, but not as much as we missed them. With soup season upon us, may I suggest that you try making your own beef stock from Doug’s soup bones. It will really be more like beef osso buco, full of marrow for richness and gelatinous clarity and lots of meat for color and flavor. Heritage Farm also has chicken backs and necks packaged for stock, and you can always add some wings to the mix to add more depth from denser bones. Here are recipes for stocks.

Once you have those stocks prepared and frozen in batches, you can put together some of my favorite fall dishes, including the soups in this Mark Bittman article. You can also make those now while we have almost all of the ingredients you need in the market and thaw them out during the cooler months instead of having to use grocery store produce out-of-season from who knows where.

Start thinking Uncle Fred for BBQ and football. You can pre-order what you might need for the weekend, buy it freshly smoked on Wednesday and reheat over the weekend. And think about making your own beans, slaw and potato salad—we will have recipes for all of those sides at the table too. They are actually easier to make for a crowd that will eat them all up. We eat leftovers of my slaw and potato salad all the time, but both are always best before they have been refrigerated. But soups almost always benefit from being reheated at least once.

Nyall of Celtic Pasties is now bringing the Early Thanksgiving pastie. This week he is also adding a Pork and Apple variety, which sounds wonderful.

Here is Mark Bittman’s latest New York Times magazine piece about zucchini recipes. He encourages you to use other squashes, including the pattypan variety, which is abundantly on display at Shenandoah Seasonal. Winfield Farm may have larger microgreens this week, and they will certainly have more variety. Isn’t it amazing how different they can taste even as sprouts? And you can’t beat them for nutrition. Teach the kids how to enjoy them on their sandwiches and they will be eating the equivalent of at least two veggies between the bread slices.

Join us at our Lorton market Thursday for live jazz! And remember to check our Facebook page for updates from vendors.

See you at the market!

From the Market Master

If you’re reading this, you may already be a member of the proverbial choir. You may be at least generally aware of what is happening to the food-supply chain in this country, somewhat familiar with the writings of Michael Pollan, aware of the work of activists such as Jamie Oliver, and committed already to buying local. I also know that there is a lot more that we do not know that would appall us. But how often do we see a story about food safety inspections on the front page of a national newspaper for all to read?

This Washington Post story is good news and bad news all in one revelation. The bad news is obvious: the U.S. Department of Agriculture is in the process of expanding a new pork-inspection program that has utterly failed us in its pilot stages; the good news is that this is news at all.

At the same time, another story has not yet made the front page and hasn’t made it into any of the newsletters devoted to the safety and security of our food chain that I already receive. We have a loyal shopper to thank for alerting me last week.

The USDA ruled Aug. 30 that China may process chicken that has been raised and slaughtered in the U.S. or Canada and export it back to the U.S. in the form of soups and chicken nuggets, none of which will be required to have “country of origin” labeling. We have been assured that none of this chicken will be fed to our schoolchildren, but that hardly qualifies as even a nugget of good news. Four plants in China were audited and subsequently approved, but there will be no USDA inspectors on site from now on and only periodic on-site reviews (not inspections) of the Chinese operations. China has been poisoning their own people for years with water, soil and air that is unfit for human consumption.

The most interesting aspect is that the push comes from the U.S. beef industry, which has lobbied heavily for this change. The beef interests believe that opening this opportunity for China will encourage them to reopen their country to our beef exports. Even the U.S. poultry industry is only “cautiously optimistic” that this is a good idea for food safety or a business advantage for the U.S. So we are back to Big Beef and its influence on our food system once again. I think it’s time for Big Consumer to be heard on these issues because obviously no one is asking us.

Case in point: The USDA website has two pages devoted to Frequently Asked Questions, and not one of those “questions” or answers mentions the recent history of China’s food-safety system or deals in any way with the labeling of these products. I can’t help but think that if the public was actually asking the questions, these issues would have been raised.

The worst-case scenario would be if the Chinese processors slip their own chicken into the processing plant or subcontract with processing plants that are not on the list. And why wouldn’t they do that if they could sell more chicken, make more money, and get away with it? Just look at what the garment makers across the world get away with under the radar until a plant collapses and kills hundreds of people.

Even our plants here in the U.S., which do have USDA inspectors on site, can’t always turn out meat products that are safe for us to eat, and now we are asked to trust Chinese plants with our health and safety. And as far as we know, they will not have any inspectors. I am sure that government risk assessors have combed the data for the potential for bad outcomes with this new policy, but I would rather trust my own safety and that of my family to the friendly farmer and grazier at the farmers’ market and the small Virginia- and Pennsylvania-based businesses that process their animals.

It’s too bad that most people in this country do not know about their options or do not have the opportunity to buy local. I have a sneakin’ suspicion that they would look to buy local as well if they knew the facts.

Photo by Sarah Sertic