I appreciate that this was written from a vendor point of view, since there’s not enough of that out there. Moreover, I think we need a national awareness campaign about how markets organize themselves around diverse shopping bases while also paying attention to the deep needs of their farmers and producers.That idea makes them unique within the food system since markets have to constantly manage the social and human benefits along with the economic ones.
What strikes me as unsaid in this piece and in so many that I read is that education to the general public of market organizers using different strategies to achieve these goals, including different vendor groups, specific locations either embedded within a targeted area or on an edge between dozens of zip codes, and managing different sets of incentives to achieve those goals. As long as people think that markets see themselves as a one-type-fits-all, we will constantly struggle with our impact and when seeking support from folks like the USDA, city government and private funders. You can hear that struggle in the comments about “pricing” in this piece.
How to bring farmers markets to the urban poor – The Washington Post.
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