From Farm to Fork

Shopping at a local farmers’ market is one of the best ways to improve your diet and your overall health.

- Anne Marie O’Connor

Do you still struggle to eat the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables a day? You’re not alone. According to a 2015 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only one in 10 Americans consumes the recommended amount. One reason: “A lifetime of only consuming under-ripe and tasteless produce shipped into grocery stores from long distance production fields,” says Diana Dyer, MS, RD, a dietitian and organic farmer in Ann Arbor, MI, who grows 40 varieties of garlic, which she sells at local farmers’ markets.

Thankfully, right now—the end of the summer—is one of the best times to enjoy the bounty of the harvest. Farmers’ markets around the country are overflowing with piles of radishes, beets and carrots in a rainbow of colors; juicy, candy-sweet melons, peaches, nectarines and apples; herbs so aromatic you can smell them from five feet away; and heaps of lettuce and greens that make bagged salads look sad in comparison. Even the basics—broccoli, zucchini, string beans and potatoes—are newly tempting when they’re just picked.

At the farmers’ market, everything tastes better,” agrees Mary Jane Detroyer, MS, RD, CDN, a dietitian, exercise physiologist and personal trainer in New York City. “The radishes are crisper, the lettuce tastes better.”

“For me, the draw of a farmers’ market is that I know everything hasn’t traveled 3,000 miles, so it’s fresher than fresh,” says Marie Simmons, a Eugene, OR-based cooking instructor and food writer whose most recent cookbook is Whole World Vegetarian (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). “Once you start eating, say, carrots from the farmers’ market, you’re not going to want to eat carrots that have been in storage for months.”

BENEFITS BY THE BUSHEL