Hunkering Down

We do most of our shopping at the local farmer’s market, cooking what we buy at home. We are accustomed to making nutrient-dense foods from the best farms we can find. Going to our Sunday outdoor market is a ritual, and we thought we were feeling calm, doing what we do habitually. We assumed hunkering down while cooking at home would feel pretty natural; it’s how we live.

We began to question our assumptions when we went to our farmer’s market yesterday. Whole foods had periods of empty shelves all week, and we expected a busy outdoor market. But it was eerily quiet without the music and chatter of diners sitting around, kids in tow, enjoying their Sunday morning. The market was without the usual comradery created by the eating of everything from guava croissants to pupusas and musubi. The tables were gone; without a DJ, there was no bossa nova in the background. With the absence of music and tables went any vestige of every Sunday morning’s typical casual community vibe.

The market was busy right from the opening bell. With many new faces among the crowd, more than a few were looking quite bewildered. Maybe folks were trying to figure out what to cook and eat at the moment based on what they found available. Perhaps they were unused to planning for many meals. Maybe they were calculating which family members would be home, and when. Remembering who liked what to eat. Remembering those extra kids, they’d volunteered to home-school for the next three or four weeks. Remembering their aging aunt who needs food brought to her as she has only one lung and is afraid to go out.

Perhaps some were wondering what the heck they were even buying. I saw an older woman staring blankly at a chunky celery root – brown, fuzzy, and warty; it’s hairy folds looking vaguely sexual. She commented to no one in particular about not knowing what to do with her handful of wilting fennel bulbs, while rifling through the last wrinkly black radishes on the market table. I overheard a man asking what he was buying as he filled his bag with not-quite-ripe purple passion fruit, thinking they were tomatoes. It’s tapering toward the end of citrus season, and many jostled huge bags of tangerines and oranges. Were they for juicing – perhaps for vitamin C? Eggs were hoisted in flats tied with string while shoppers juggled heavy market bags, balancing all of it as best they could.

The longest lines I’ve ever seen at an outdoor market were at the fish and grass-fed meat vendors. Farmers and other sales folk looked completely bushed by 10:30, just two hours into the five-hour market. The bean guy told me he sold out within the first half-hour. I asked him if he thought there would be a market next week, given government suggestions discouraging gatherings of over fifty. He told me he would be there regardless, right at his spot, whether the rest of the market was on or not.

I was surrounded by urgent cellphone conversations about where in the 2 & 1/2 blocks of market friends and partners could be located. The confusion about whereabouts added to the general sense of disorientation, as a visibly thin layer of panic washed over faces. Was this subtle sense of panic due to the hoarding mentality that spread quickly among the shoppers? Once you see someone with two flats of eggs, a tow sack sized bag of oranges, and a giant cold-bag full of frozen steaks, you begin to wonder whether you’re nuts shopping for just the week as usual.

I felt lucky to be in a city with a reasonably deep foodshed, but not knowing what to expect next is confusing, and we at the market seemed to be so far outside of our comfort zone. Bested by a virus, one of the smallest organisms on the planet, can we maintain our humanity, our sense of purpose, and fairness? It made me think about wartime and countries with chronic food shortages. I thought about children who rely on their now-closed schools for lunch. For all our thinly veiled panic, can we as a community summon our basic goodness, finding compassion for those in need of our care? Were the smiles, jokes, the knowing winks, and doomsday humor an attempt to appear casual in the face of the pure unknown? If you have the personal bandwidth for it, here’s a link to Feeding America, a powerful and efficient network of 200 food banks across the county. It’s just the beginning of the hunkering.