This notion of food taking the express from the ground to one’s mouth
has mass appeal—sometimes called freshness. We don’t get a whole lot of
that around here. Lettuce heads I’ve bought at “the supermarket” have gone brown
inside of a week—which (looking at you, Shaw’s) is lame. And sure, Whole
Foods has good produce—but you have to go to Whole Foods. Since I learned how to
sort-of cook, I have longed for a permanent public market that I could swing
through to buy ingredients and do all of those other things reserved for public
market scenarios: successful flirting, skillful fish-throwing and, if I’m ever
pursued by the police, motorcycling.The high-speed chases and fresh ingredients I am looking for may not be far off, as the Boston Public Market Association (BPMA) steps ever closer to their tricky goal. In the mid-‘90s, the Massachusetts Department of Food and Agriculture started organizing folks around the idea of getting a public market together. Greg Bialecki, a local attorney who now chairs the BPMA, attended those initial meetings. “I represent a number of nonprofit land conservation organizations,” he tells me, “including several who do farmland preservation work, and I had seen that in order to keep farms financially viable in Massachusetts, there had to be opportunities for farmers to sell directly to customers, not just wholesale.”
At the beginning of July, the BPMA made a significant step forward with the opening of the Boston
Public Market on the pedestrian Northern Avenue Bridge over Fort
Point Channel. Bialecki sees the new market as a “stepping stone” toward a
permanent location and, perhaps more importantly at this stage, “a tangible sign
of what we are about.” For the rest of us, the market could offer a completely new perspective on getting dinner. The south face of downtown looms over the weathered iron bridge, which is lined with bright canopies facing the harbor. The steady stream of foot traffic makes the market feel like it’s always here—when it’s really just twice a week. For its modest size, the offerings are sprawling: fresh (glass-bottled) milk from Smiling Hill of Westbrook, ME; spices from the Spice Genie ; herb-infused honeys, oils, nuts and vinegars from Groton’s Herb Lyceum; goat’s milk cheeses and soaps (!) from Crystal Brook Farm of Sterling; shiitake mushrooms and cut flowers from Old Friends Farm in Amherst; organic meats from Mamashöe in Petersham; and an incredible assembly of just-now-picked produce from the Farm School in Athol. That’s just a sampling.
One huge advantage to public markets is having the opportunity to
interact directly with the growers, butchers and, um, creamers (?) themselves.
If the sleepy cashier at the Stop & Shop has ever looked at your dill as
though it had been plucked from the surface of another planet, you’ll find the
friendly expertise of the market vendors quite refreshing. I learned what garlic
scapes were (good for stir fry) and what Merguez sausages are all about (lamb,
harissa and garlic). I also discovered, as Bialecki warned, that I am
powerless against the Nourse Farm raspberry tart—as he is currently grappling
with “getting hooked” on Smiling Hill’s coffee milk. Can we have this all the
time, please?"It is possible that the bridge could be the home of the permanent site, but we are not counting on it,” Bialecki says. “Now we intend to take the next year or so to do a careful search for an appropriate permanent location.” While development space in Boston remains at a premium, our collective capacity for patience seems endless—which will come in handy for us die-hard market groupies.
In the meantime, as Bialecki urges, “the No. 1 thing is to come by the market and support the farmers and vendors. We are really trying to improve it every week.”
A COMPLETE LIST OF LOCAL FARMERS’ MARKETS AND INDIVIDUAL VENDORS CAN BE FOUND BY VISITING WWW.BOSTONPUBLICMARKET.ORG.