Jun 28 2009
Farmers’ Markets
I live in a strange place: Berks County in southeastern Pennsylvania. Why strange? Strange because it has changed so rapidly over the last 25 years. When I first regularly spent time here starting in the 1970’s, it consisted of a city (county seat) at its center and then a few villages sprinkled throughout the rest of its diamond-shaped boundary ( yes – this is the county of John Updike’s Rabbit series.) Everything else was farmland. Active farmland.
This agrarian county was so peaceful and wholesome that it was pretty BORING to the high school youth, who frequently moved away the first chance they got. But then they somehow wandered back to raise their families. It was very common to drive past miles and miles of cornfields to get to anywhere. But things started changing, slowly, and initially on a small scale.
Who should I blame, if blame there must be? Commercial lenders? Definitely yes. Those &*^$% money-grubbers kept supporting new strip malls or shopping centers when good commercial properties stood vacant. The Chamber of Commerce? Probably. I served on a committee in the Chamber and could see that its vision of “good” or “progress” was and is to transform Berks County into a clone of King of Prussia, an upscale expensive highway-riddled fast-paced, did I say expensive?, sophisticated area in suburban Philadelphia. The Chamber could not see the goodness that Berks County had, and so committed itself to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The then-and-future residents? Yes. They lusted after the lifestyle of the afore-mentioned Philadelphia suburbs.
Twenty-five years ago, one did not use the word “suburbs” for Berks County. There was big-city Reading, and then there were Leesport and Kutztown and Mohnton and Shillington and Mt. Penn and Bernville and Birdsboro and Hamburg and Morgantown. Each was separated from the other by fields and farms. Manure was a springtime fragrance along our 2-lane roads. However since that time, real estate developers (I forgot to also apportion blame to them) have persuaded families to transform their farms into housing tracts. We now have the vinyl siding suburban houses and the *%^#^& townhouse/condo horror zones. We now use the word “suburbs.”
We now have barely any farmland. Instead, there are more malls, and parking lots. There are national chain stores instead of the independent locally-owned bookstore, hardware store and fabric shops. There are franchises of every fast- and medium-fast food chains. And the highways – bleccch! Lots of macadam covers former vegetation. Fields and woods are becoming scarce.
Curiously, there is a new trendy activity that Berks County communities are racing to create. Guess what? They want Famers’ Markets! We have always had a few small indoor halls which open one to three days per week for farmers and vendors to sell. But to be truly au courant, a community must have an open air market with local, and even organic, produce. Sort of like the roadside stands we used to have? Strange, this Berks County.
