Sweet Success… and a warm thank you.

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I would like to start out with a sigh of relief… ah.  What an amazing day we had yesterday!

First, thank you to all who supported us. Thank you committee members for continuing to volunteer your time and passion every year!  Thank you to all the positive volunteers who showed up bright and early ready to help!  Thank you to all of our special vendors for arriving and forming an irresistible venue.  Thank you Town and Country Liquors for being our sponsor!  Thank you Willy Neumann for creating funky eye candy for the market customers.  Thank you local luminaries and political members for helping us open the season with our annual ribbon cutting.  Thank you patrons and customers of the Saugerties Farmers Market for constantly supporting us, sharing your excitement about what we’re doing, and supporting this amazing local community we have at our finger tips.  We couldn’t have succeeded without all of you!

Now, without further ado, our sweet success!  Saturday May 24th 2014, the Saugerties Farmers Market’s first day open.  Market set up began at 7:30am sharp.  By 9:00am vendors were arriving and setting up for the day.  The weather had decided to bless us with fertilizing rain, a dose of a couple hours was all the clouds decided to subject us to.  10:00am customers started arriving!  We saw more people than expected, everyone seemed to ignore the rain.  By 11:00am we had cut the ribbon twice (once for real, the second time for the news reporter), and the rain had cleared to reveal a bright blue sky.  Walking around was a delight to the senses.  Everywhere we looked there were people laughing, shopping, eating, experiencing, learning, playing and creating.  Our Chef demo by James Tamayo was soooo tasty!  Around the corner from James’ food was a real live angora rabbit spinning demonstration.  Although the weather had prevented the Paul Green Rock Academy from joining us, we had our back-up CD tunes happily drifting among customers from our music booth.  We’ll have the Rock Academy come back some other time this year. Overall, I had a great time getting to know our new vendors, new customers and re-meeting old friends.

This season will just keep getting better.  We have new vendors joining us and staples coming every week.  The Market will always have something for everyone.  If you missed our opening, no worries, come next week.  We’ll be open every Saturday until October, and then indoors for the Holiday markets!  Add a bit of community into your life, come be a regular at the Market.

 

This Decades’ Healthy Food Movement

I’m a product of my environment, we all are.  I was raised on the, “not so typical american diet” which consisted of A LOT more veggies than the majority of my peers.  The food I ate was weird.  I never had the luxury of a fair trade when it came to the contents of my lunch box.  I was pretty much stuck with what mom packed me.

Despite being weird and “healthy” I did like the food my mom had to offer.  She kept things exciting.  She was unpredictable.  I remember wondering, “is tonight raw cuisine, or maybe vegan mac and cheese… how can mac and cheese be vegan?”  I was always impressed at her determination to keep us healthy and open-minded when it came to the dinner table.  We were not an easy crowd!  My dad comes from the land of buffalo wings and dinner rolls, otherwise known as Rochester, NY.  My brother and I, of course, come from both our mom and dad so, sometimes we had dad’s aversions and other times mom would surprise us with something really good.  My food environment was lush, and as a product of that environment I grew up open-minded (and maybe a tad bit scarred.)

As a young girl in the late 1990’s I started noticing a change at my local grocery store.  They had installed a “health food” section of grocery products.  I noticed signs popping up like, “local.” There were Farmers’ Markets everywhere, and they were thriving!  I started to realize how important these conscious changes were to people.  The best part was, my mom had put me right on board.  I was already experiencing and living these new advertisements for Health.

From that time to our present, I have experienced so much innovative growth and research surrounding this massive movement towards HEALTH, and local agriculture!  Not only that, new entrepreneurial businesses supporting all sides of this movement are starting up: from the farms, to the farmers, to the markets, to the sellers, to the chefs, to the products… “there’s an APP for that.”

Ingredient1 transforms the typical grocery store experience into a personalized shopping spree. Imagine, floating through your grocery store on a cloud.  You know exactly what you can eat and where to get it.  The usual stress of shopping has disappeared.  Oh, and that allergy you’ve had since birth… no biggie.  The Ingredient1 app shows you what you can eat, exclusively, based on your allergies, dietary preferences, and desires.  Not only can you choose exclusive product search results, you have the ability to search out those LOCAL products you’re so savvy about.  Never mind a health food section, try a health food database!  My 10 year old self would have been awestruck by now.

Ingredient1 is one of so many amazing new movements enabling health accessibility to the masses.  I ran across a local food distributing service called Field Goods. Field Goods sources produce and bread from local farmers and delivers local fresh food to convenient locations for pick-up.  It’s an all year round Farmers Market!  Subscribe and enjoy wonderful sustainable farm fresh products every week.

How about a personal grocery shopper, Instacart does all of your shopping for you at the click of a button!  Howgood rates your food on a scale from “none” to “great” depicted in watermelons. 10,4672 products have been meticulously rated by Howgood‘s team of analyzers.

It’s amazing right!  So many options, so many ways of choosing health.

That reminds me… I have another very important way of supporting your health, Farmers’ Markets!  There are 8,144 Farmers Markets in the US.  Thats a pretty good amount!  The best part is, they’re in your back yard!  What better way is there to appreciate your family than by bringing home the most nutritious freshest produce possible.  Not to mention, the direct contact you have with the growers of the food.  It feels good to experience the environment of your food.  After all, we are a product of our environment!  Come join us at the the Saugerties Farmers Market, our veggies will do the talking.