I love thick, juicy slices of Heirloom tomatoes in a sandwich, or chopped up in a salad, but I like them best just seasoned with salt and pepper and served up on a plate. They are far and away better than any supermarket tomato.  As Ron describes them, “they are ugly peckerwoods, but they taste like a real tomato.”  Exactly.  Their imperfection is part of their perfection. They are homely and irregular in color, misshapen and scarred: natural. Unlike the pale red globes you find heaped together in the supermarket, perfectly round and lackluster with very little flavor. My preferred place to buy heirloom tomatoes and, really any produce, is a farmers market.  I like supporting local growers and the food is superior to commercially sold produce.  When picking out my tomatoes, I like to imagine that they were plucked warm from the fields of a small local farm and carted straight to the outdoor market, ripe and fresh, for me to take home for salad or a lovely pasta sauce.

A few weeks ago, we happened upon a local farmers market while looking for a place to eat near the water. It was a beautiful, sunny day in San Diego. A light breeze helped keep us cool while we poked along under the canopies, checking out the goods.  Dogs lagged on leashes and people maneuvered strollers through the small crowd, piling bags of fruits and vegetables on top of the kid inside.  Vendors arranged their harvest for maximum appeal, spread across the table as if it had just tumbled from bushels, or stacked in small baskets with the prettiest samples on top.  The produce was spritzed with water every few minutes for that “just washed” look in case there were germaphobes among the shoppers.  Excuse me, did you check this for Listeria? 

There were several booths, so sellers vied for the attention of shoppers, touting their produce as the freshest and tastiest.  “You won’t find strawberries as fresh as these anywhere else,” a sunburned man in wide-brimmed fishing hat told me as I was strolling by.  “These were just picked yesterday.”  He handed me one and I bit into it.  It was deep red, juicy, and sweet; perfect for strawberry shortcake or jam.  I told him I’d take two pints.  “Do you have a bag?” He asked me. “I don’t,” I said, “we just came from lunch and didn’t know we’d be shopping.” He side-glanced me and pulled a plastic bag from under the table. I paid him and skulked away like a scolded dog.

At the other end of the marketplace were all the vegetables you’d expect to see.  We loaded up on romaine lettuce, celery, beets, and carrots and headed to the car, our grocery bags bulging with our haul. By the time we got home, the mixed aroma of fruits and vegetables had blended into a luscious perfume that lingered in the car into the next day.

When we lived in Northern California, we frequented a huge farmers market in San Jose. “Produce Row,” is located at the center of a 120-acre flea market.  It is what little farmers markets want to be when they grow up.  There are aisles upon aisles of produce, both common and obscure. 
We passed carrots in a variety of colors, still dusted with soil; gleaming purple eggplant and forest green avocados; long, slender green beans and Brussels sprouts the size of golf balls; bananas, oranges, and dragon fruit in brilliant pops of color; dusty brown jicama, and stacks of knobby nopales.  It is a cornucopia on a massive scale. 

On one trip, as we were passing through the vegetable section on the hunt for corn, we heard a woman shouting, “Wundelawundelawundela!”  She was small, brown, and enthusiastic. She had a bag of dried pinto beans in one hand and a bag of un-shucked corn in the other.  She held the bags high and shook them as she repeated, “Wundelawundelawundela!”  We stood staring at her for a moment, trying to figure out what she was saying. She looked straight at me and shouted,  “Lady! Wundelawundelawundela.” Backing away from her, I said to Ron out of the side of my mouth, “Do you know what she’s saying?”  Should I be afraid?  My son was twelve at the time.  He took one of the earphones from his ear and let it dangle on the cord.  He frowned and said with the impatience of a preteen to his lame parents, “I think she’s saying, ‘one dollar’.”  He put his earphone back in his ear.  I looked at the woman.  She nodded at my son.  “Yeah, wundela for all!”  We bought one-dollar bags of green beans, Brussels sprouts, and corn before moving on. 

Ron’s favorite part of Produce Row is the nuts and snacks aisle. Here you can find nuts of every variety:  pistachios, almonds, walnuts, pecans, pine nuts, peanuts, and nuts I’ve never heard of.  They come shelled, un-shelled, flavored, salted, or plain.  Wafting through the area is the aroma of fresh-popped kettle corn and warm churros smothered in sugar and cinnamon. On this particular day, Ron picked up a bag of roasted peanuts, a dozen churros, and a punching bag-sized bag of popcorn. For the rest of the day, he was a very happy man.  I bought walnuts and a one pound bag of candied pecans. I’m the practical one.

When we’d run out of room in our two-wheeled shopping cart, we decided it was time to go. We arranged the bags in the cart to fit more snuggly, and I threw my purse on top. It was getting hot, so we unloaded everything into our SUV in a hurry and cranked the air conditioning.  Ron was driving, and about ten minutes into the ride home, a bee flew in my face.  What the Hell?   I used both hands to wave it away and opened my window, hoping it would exit.  It did.  Then I saw a bee land on Ron’s arm.  “Bee!” I said, flicking at it, “Open your window!”  The bee was buzzing around in a panic when two more joined us, bumping against the inside of the windshield trying to bust out.   “Where are these bees coming from?” I asked, looking at Ron as if he could tell me.  My son was in the back seat at full attention for the first time all day.  He leaned forward to shout into the front seat, “Dad, there’s a bee back here!”  I turned to see him roll down his window and throw the bee out, bare-handed.  Impressive.  “Ron, pull over,” I was getting frantic; imagining the worst, like in a horror movie where the bees seek revenge for some environmentally motivated reason.   We pulled into a convenience store parking lot and bailed out of the car.  We opened the back hatch and pulled all the bags out onto the ground.  One bee flew out of a bag in a stupor and went on its way.  We checked the bags for some sort of bee party going on in one of them.  Nothing.  No more bees.  We opened the car doors and let any stragglers clear out before cautiously re-entering.  It was a tense ride home; hair tickling my cheek made me slap at myself more than once. Later, we decided that the fruit had drawn the bees.  When we were unloading the cart, they were probably hovering over a bag, investigating, when we threw another bag on top of it, trapping them.  But we don’t really know.

In the past few years, I’ve noticed that many farmers markets have branched out to include items you would not have looked for in the past.  “Oh, gee.  I think I’ll go to the farmers market and see if I can find a soy-based-caramel-latte-scented candle.”  Today, outdoor markets are full of homemade candles in a plethora of scents.  I admire the folks who have honed this craft, but what makes a person decide to make candles and sell them? Can they make a profit? I ask myself this question every time I buy a candle. Then there is the hot sauce. I went to a farmers market a couple of weeks ago that had an entire booth dedicated to a huge variety of hot sauces. Just for fun, I asked the young man working the booth, “what is the difference between Ass-kickin’ Sweat Sauce and Slap Yo’ Momma Fire Juice?”  I thought it was funny; he didn’t get it, and passionately launched into an explanation about peppers, capsicum and the Scoville scale. After a minute, I tuned out and wondered if I could use some of the hottest stuff to deter bugs from basil plants.  

Another popular staple of farmers markets is honey. There is generally an assortment of light to dark honey cultivated from Dandelion, Acacia, or Orange Blossom, for example.  A savvy vendor will allow you to sample the honey.  I am never able to resist trying the different varieties and will always end up with a jar before moving on, a honey spoon still jutting from my mouth.

When they are available, I always buy a bouquet of flowers as I leave the farmers market, gently sliding them stems-down into a bag filled with produce, honey, probably a candle, and maybe a bee or two. The flowers are the finishing touch on a lovely outing, every moment touched by nature’s bounty.  I can’t wait to get home and make a salad with my ugly tomatoes.