NY Butcher Protests Greenmarket – Believes Hipsters Want Good Food Too

Thanks to Grub Street, I now know about Tom Mylar and his GroceryGuy blog.  This man speaks the gospel, from what I can tell, and I can really appreciate his sensibilities regarding the state of not just the NYC Greenmarket, but the Farmer’s Market culture in general.  What hath we wrought upon ourselves?!?

When shopping at a Farmer’s Market becomes more status than sustenance, or when it becomes more commodity than community, we all suffer.  Have we boxed the small organic farmer into a corner now?  Where they have to haul and drive themselves to a market or three every weekend in order to make “wholesome food” more “convenient” to the bridge and tunnel crowd?  Or are we still happy to pay the premium prices for direct access to their product from within the confines of the urban pastiche?

I’m still a committed market shopper and CSA subscriber, much like I am still a committed environmentalist, but I question both the sustainability of the current incarnation of “Local-Organic-Artisan” as well as the general marketing hype that goes with it all.  It all makes me sad actually, because for a while I thought we were on the right path…but now it’s jumped the shark into schtick.  I will perservere though.

I’m going to muse on this for a while, and file it under topics to which I will likely return, because the good food movement is teetering on the edge of Green Noise territory, if not already having gone over.

In an ironic way to end a post that started about a butcher, I can’t help but keep coming back to Mark Bittman’s comment from the video I recently posted…Eat Food, Most of it Vegetables.  Is vegetarianism the new black?  The new ‘in’ thing for foodies?  Hmm….