Wayne R.
Yelp
If you're lucky, it only takes an hour and a half to get in and out of here if you buy a week's worth of food basics.
Why do I say "if you're lucky"?
Because you're not just shopping for food; you're meeting great people and having great conversations in this one-stop food literacy class.
We spent five minutes talking with the fellow at Forbes WIld Foods, learning about butternut trees that produce a walnut-style nut with a buttery taste. It grows throughout most of southern Ontario (up to North Bay), and produces a nutritious and delicious nut with healthy oils and protein, while supporting eco-friendly agro-forestry.
We spent five minutes with the famous Ruth Klaasen at Monfiorte Cheese, talking about whether cheese is a fermented product, and thereby worthy of being classed as probiotic. Ruth says yes to fermented, and not sure about probiotic. But it's worth checking out.
We went to buy an Easter ham, but only untreated ham was available; no problem, the young farmers explained in great detail how to cook it (some spices, half a bottle of white wine beneath the roast and a few other tricks of the trade) and it was probably the best-tasting ham of my life.
We spent ten minutes at ChocoSol with Michael Sacco, who gave us a talk on actionism, the philosophy behind the merry band of chocolatiers at ChocoSol.
We spent five minutes at the stand of the person who makes his own tempeh, out of both beans and grains. We loved the piece made of chickpea last week, so he urged us to try sunflower seeds and oats this week, after explaining how grains can be included in tempeh.
Our mushroom stop took five minutes, as we learned the details of what mushrooms go best with soups, and which go best as meat substitutes.
Our cracker stop with Evelyn's Crackers took 5 minutes as we raved about the oatmeal crackers, and he asked us to try a new line of buns they were experimenting with.
Our wine stop at Tawse, the organic and biodynamic producers, took another five minutes, as did our stop at the fish shop, as did our stop for salad greens at BizJak -- basically updates about how are you, and general chit chat.
Not a good place to come if you're in a rush to run in and out to buy whatever is fast and easy to cook.
Markets are the slow shopping prequel to slow food - that is food with conviviality, which is what food is fundamentally about in the human experience.
I rate this as the supreme health contribution that food makes -- contributing to mental health, not only though nutrients, such as the probiotics inherent in many of the above (especially the tempeh), but mainly through the conviviality.
Our society is not short of opportunities to shop without making human contact of any kind. What we need, I argue in my e-book Food for City Building, is new ways to weave pleasant and positive social experiences into everyday life. This is what farmers markets do.