Jersey Fresh

Oh, werd?

At the risk of infringing on Barbara Kingsolver’s copyrights, I am going to discuss a weekend of eating locally. (Also, I risk infringing on Ben’s territory of blogging about meals. Y’all should read his blog.)

Anyhoo, on Saturday morning I bounded out of bed as if on Christmas morning. (For my Jewish friends who have never known the excitement of thinking a magical man with a flying sled has broken into your house and left a heaping pile of wrapped gifts under an indoor fir tree overnight, this means I was *very* excited.) It was the start of the Montclair farmers’ market!

I hopped on my bike, and Eric grabbed his roller blades for the short trip to the Walnut Street train station where the tents and tables were displayed. At first glance, one could be easily lured into a trance by the bright red “Jersey Fresh” tomatoes. That is until I considered our own baby tomato plants growing in the backyard. New Jersey, particularly North Jersey, does not produce real tomatoes until mid-July. These were hot house tomatoes from South Jersey (parts of which, I believe, supported the Confederacy). Also, many of the “farms” at the market were actually middle-men that sold produce from other areas. It was still a small-scale economy, but it was not quite direct from the farmer produce.

We wandered to the far corner of the train station parking lot where a no-frills table displayed the *actual* spring bounty of Jersey – organic lettuce, spring garlic, parsnips, and spinach. Behind the table stood an unassuming man with torn jeans and dirty hands. Farmer John!

FJ: You get a 10% discount for being a CSA member. Um… 10% of $3…. Here. Just take another handful of parsnips.

We bought parsnips for soup, lettuce for salad, and spring garlic to garnish the asparagus we planned to bring to the farm picnic the next day.

At another table, we ran into the spice man who used to operate under our apartment (next to the liquor store). We had last interacted with him when he raced out the back door of his shop to donate a rubbing spice to our backyard rib roast two summers ago. He had a variety of curries for sale in small ziplock bags. We grabbed a pack as well as a free-range chicken from the neighboring stand and a couple of Confederate tomatoes.

Finally, on the way out, we stopped at the fish table. Although the fish table was waving the “Jersey Caught” banner, many of the fish did not seem like local fare. (Mahi mahi?) There had been Barnegat Bay oysters and Highlands clams, but savvy locavores from Montclair had already snapped them up. Even the local bluefish was sold out. (Okay, so Montclair locavores aren’t *that* savvy… Who pays for bluefish? If rich Montclarians are cutting back by buying “cheap local bluefish!” someone should tell them that if you drop something shiny in the Raritan Bay, like, say, your ring finger, a bluefish will bite it.)

That night, we feasted on curried free-range chicken garnished with tomatoes and spring garlic.

The next day, we roasted Jersey asparagus with olive oil and spring garlic and headed to the farm picnic potluck. The invitation noted to "BYO". We assumed (as I'm sure most twenty-somethings would) that we should BYO beer. As we realized when the column of Volvo station wagons parked by the fields opened to reveal hordes of toddlers and newborns, we were supposed to BYO babies. Oops. As throngs of new parents opened containers of milk, juice, and animal crackers, Eric and I cracked some Flying Fish Summer Farmhouse Ales. Who knew having young offspring was a prerequisite of joining the CSA? Luckily, there were four other childless people from the Jersey City CSA with whom we quickly joined forces.

The farm tour itself was wonderful. We learned how the seeds and plants were added to the fields. We saw mature asparagus plants waving in the breeze. Farmer John told tales of running over the irrigation system with the tractor on a regular basis.

(Eric: See? Farmer John likes beer too!)

We also learned about farm labor. Despite the fact that there are almost no experienced farm hands for hire from the state of New Jersey, Farmer John must, by law, prove that he tried to hire some Jersey Fresh employees by spending money on ads in newspapers and Craigslist. (Awesome Summer Jobs in Agriculture! -Sussex County, NJ) Invariably, there are no qualified locals, so he is then allowed to bring back his crew of Central American farmhands, most of whom are from Nicaragua. But not this year.

Farmer John: Nicaragua didn't sign some free trade agreement, so I am not allowed to hire my guys this season. I'll have to find a whole different group of workers from a country we are better at oppressing.

(Yay politically radical farmers!)

The amount of work that goes into operating an organic farm is immense, and the profit margin is slim. Farmer John does not own any of his land but instead rents it from relatively wealthy NJ landowners. Virtually all of NJ's farmland is worth way more on the real estate market than a farmer could earn from it, so available land is too expensive for John to buy. Unfortunately, other than tomatoes, Jersey's main crop right now is McMansions and condos. One benefit of the downturn is that some land may reach a price that farmers can actually afford. Until then, though, it was heartening to see so many families (and six twenty-somethings with beer) celebrating their commitment to local agriculture. We all want to keep farms in our regions, but to do that we have to buy from our regions, teach our children to eat food from our region, and bring beers to farm family picnic days.