Behold the Future
The Farmer’s Market is laid out before you. Stalls upon stalls of vendors with small flocks of people at them flank either side of the path you are walking down.
It seems familiar to the ones in your youth. People selling their goods. What they made with their hands in their homes. Grew in their yard. Cultivated by their touch. Offerings completely unique.
It seems familiar. There are people selling goods, you can see that. You approach a stall. A man, wearing overalls and a cliche farmer hat is standing behind a orderly table topped with packaged fruit.
“Hello,” he calls to you when you stand and stare at his wares.
You respond dully, more interested in what he is selling than him or his clothes. You look at the fruit, wrapped in shiny plastic. It looks like an apple. It is an apple, but last time you checked apples weren’t wrapped in plastic like this or so shiny or so perfectly shaped. You take a glance at the other apples he has.
They all look the same.
You inspect the apple you had initially been looking at. A colorful, calculated label saying ‘Farm Fresh’ with the ‘TM’ tucked nicely beside it. There present, smaller, but there, is an asterisk.
You take the package and look for its mate.
You find it and the message:
The FDA does not certify that this product is, in fact, Farm Fresh.
Well, then.
“Where were these grown?” you ask the man.
His hands are holding his too-clean overalls. His eyes flicker at you and then he nods with a slight grin.
“What was your question?” he asks.
“Where were these grown?” you ask, again, making sure there is eye contact and your words are strong.
“We procure our crops from a variety of different locations,” he explains, “and the crops go through a packaging process and a quality assurance process.”
Uh, huh.
“What breed are they?” you ask next. You can usually tell what variety of apple one is at a glance, but the plastic makes it hard to tell. You can’t feel its skin or note the tightness of its grain. You can tell that it is red and that is about it.
“These apples are a special designation, designed for maximum flavor and crispness,” he answers. “We’ve named them the Infinity Apple.”
You nod. Slowly and heavily. You blink and put the apple back in its place. Apparently not exactly — the ambassador from the makers of the Infinity Apple carefully rearranges it.
You mutter a thanks and walk away.
You seek refuge somewhere else, somewhere more real. More true to what you remember a Farmer’s Market being.
In the distance, a few steps away, is a cheese stall. That could be what you seek. No one is at it so you go there to see what selection they have.
A cheery lady is there. You see blocks of cheeses set within a surely climate controlled box. You note at least twenty different kinds, each with a unique wrapper and logo.
“Hi!” she nearly shouts at you.
“Hi.”
You look at a block of cheese labeled ‘Good Gouda.’ You pick it up. There are words decorating it with asterisks and TMs by them. You feel a sense of deja vu.
But you try. You ask: “How long was this Gouda aged?” With all its information, it doesn’t say that.
“Oh, well, we don’t age our Gouda,” she says stiffly. “We have this process that imitates aging. Starts from the beginning of the process in our farms. We treat the cows so their milk is in a prime state for the making of the Good Gouda. Then we process the milk into the cheese and it is all ready for consumption. Reduces risk.”
“So…no salt crystals?” you inquire.
“Part of the process is a refinement phase that injects salt into the process, in a healthy way. This salt is much healthier than the normal stuff. Won’t give you any bad health risks and the flavor is much better.”
So no, not really, but you don’t say that to her pristine face. For a moment, you wonder how much she is being paid. For a moment. Then you thank her, return the cheese to its almost-place and walk away, breath shaky.
There is a stall for a bakery. You can smell the odor of freshly baked goods. You hope that is the source of the smell. A good loaf of cinnamon bread with some fresh nut butter sounds delicious, perfect for later.
The lady with the apron stands at attention, awaiting your approach.
She greets you like all the rest. You look at her selection of baked goods. Freshly baked, you had hoped, because of the smell that led you there but when you look, everything is neatly packed and there is nothing open to the world to give odor. It seems wholly wrong.
You can’t help yourself. You look at the packaging of a loaf of bread.
There are more labels and disclosures than any of the other products you have seen today.
New and improved recipe.
A no carb option!
Completely gluten-free.
Pop it in the oven for a few minutes and its like it was fresh baked.
Completely organic* ingredients.
You check the ingredient list to maybe see what grains were used. The ingredient list is like a small book, so small and tiny that the words are a blur to your eyes, which begin to water for some reason.
You back away from it. You do not even try to talk with the woman. She does, but you hurry away. You look for some last refuge in this Farmer’s Market. Something truly grown in a farm. By people. By nature in some capacity.
You quickly look for your Mushroom guy — but you remember that the new regulation put him out of business many years ago. He was one of the first to go. They said that it was dangerous. All that trade, unregulated. By ‘folks with a criminal air.’ Meaning people had served and done their time or minorities, of course. And that meant that the only mushrooms were the ones deemed to be ‘safe’ and ‘acceptable’ for him to eat.
That is all there is anymore. Packaged and processed, engineered to perfection.
Another stall piques your interest — that maybe you found something that breaks that melancholy. Fresh vegetables, fresh vegetables, unwrapped in plastic are there and you wander over.
“Hi,” you greet warmly because the person looks Human for a moment.
“Hi,” the person returns.
You stare at the vegetable — a zucchini, for a long moment.
“No packaging,” you mutter as if it were a miracle.
“Yep,” she says. “We’re way ahead of the other guys. Our veg is so resilient that it doesn’t need to be wrapped. It won’t ever go bad!”
Those words hit you right in the chest and you turn around and leave. You don’t look back. There is nothing left. One by one it was taken, chipped away. Foreign produce that ‘caught disease too often.’ Milk that was not ‘treated properly.’ Artisan cheeses died swift when the aging and curdling process was regulated and heavily inspected. Bees faded, endangered — fake honey took over. Mushrooms were not something to be foraged — too risky. Meat became grown to perfection; Cattle became blobs of meat and organs rather than an animal. Vegetables became processed products.
There is nothing real anymore. There is nothing familiar about any of it. Familiar on face, but not in truth. It is all a facade now. A play to the past. You wonder if when you’re dead and gone and everyone else that remembers is too if it’ll just be replaced with a ubiquitous substance, wrapped and imbued with the flavors to cater to all the right markets. Would save on costs that way. Would be easier to manage to ensure to the safety of the populace.
As you stumble out of the market and back into the wide world, you wonder how to ensure the safety of yourself.
As I was walking down a Farmer’s Market, I had a sudden vision of a bleak future for farmer’s markets where corporations have corrupted all aspects of the food trade. So I wrote this. I was originally going to make it satire, maybe it still is, but it feels too real. Too possible. I worry about the future of food. But there is hope and we have the power to make responsible choices to affect the future of our food.