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Thursday, June 18, 2009
The West Side Market
In late 2007, before I had found a job, Johnathan and I went to the West Side Market a few times to get our produce. We had some good experiences, but found that our produce was going bad woefully soon, despite it being the peak of harvest season for some of the vegetables that we brought home. After that, we stopped going, preferring instead to buy frozen veggies and whatever looked good at the grocery store that trip. I chalked it up to the season getting later, and perhaps that we bought too much and didn’t pick wisely. However, owing to how much we lost and the fact that in the spring, I got a job that meant working every Saturday, going to the market was out.
Since I now have Saturdays free, it meant we could go together to the market, and since it’s going on Summer, we figured it would be good to go back to the market to get some fresh vegetables and support local growers. This past Saturday, we headed out fairly early to get there before the place was absolutely packed with people. It was nice to walk from stand to stand and take in what each one had to offer. We tried to keep from buying too much from any one stand and we did our best to scope out the cheapest prices that were offered. In the end, we came away with four zucchini, four yellow squash, two limes, two lemons, two things of broccoli, two enormous vidalia onions, one very large red onion, an orange, about six peppers (at least four red, not sure why), two ham hocks and a loaf of bread. We spent about $30 total while we were there.
Incidentally, we loved doing our shopping on Saturday morning for a change instead of a weekday evening. People are so much friendlier! Both the customers and the cashiers at the stores were less pushy and stressed out. It was fantastic. It took us three hours from when we left for the market until we got home and finished putting all of the groceries away. I’d say that’s pretty good for three stops and a massive amount of groceries. (We needed to stock up on pretty much everything.)
I was feeling pretty good about our choice to buy our veggies at the market, until Tuesday morning, when I got up and wondered what the foul smell in the kitchen was. It took me a little while to figure out what it was, but I did eventually find the source. The first thing I found was that our orange was half molded over. Following that, I discovered that the foul smell actually originated from our zucchini and yellow squash. One zucchini was so rotted through it fell apart and was oozing in the bowl where I had put it. Another was almost at the same point, and a third had mold all down one side. One yellow squash had an enormous rot spot on one side. Four days after we purchased this produce, it was going bad. It doesn’t seem reasonable to me to lose so much produce in such a short span from purchase. All in all, we lost about $8 worth of produce. I was able to salvage the orange – thankfully the mold was only on the outside and I only needed its juice, but everything else was a total loss.
Needless to say, we weren’t very happy about how that turned out. We wanted our trip to the market to be a nice change to our usual shopping habits, and I really wanted to be able to support more local commerce than megamarts. I’m disappointed that we put so much faith in the people who put these stands together and that their produce ended up being sub-par. We will be going back to the market, but with this in mind, the way we shop will change:
- We won’t buy as much. Obviously this stuff is so close to being on its way out that it doesn’t last as long as expected, so we might as well go more often if we need to.
- We’ll keep track of which vendors have given us produce that’s gone south in a hurry, and which ones have given us quality produce. We might as well play favorites in this kind of scenario.
- We won’t let them pick for us from the back. With the squash and zucchini, we let them do this for us, and I think that may have been part of the cause – it was the older produce to begin with. (The orange we picked out ourselves. I have no idea what happened there.)
It’s not a lot of change, but it’s some. I’d hate to give up on the market completely so quickly after going back for the first time in a year and a half. We do want to shop at the market. We just don’t want to lose what we buy so soon after bringing it home.
If you’re in the Cleveland area, do check out the West Side Market! We’ve gotten some great bread there and the produce is really nice when it lasts a reasonable amount of time.
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