Markets and Pies

I live near an exceedingly lovely farmer's market. It's large, has beautiful produce (especially one cute farmer boy who sells really great salad mix, but that's a different story), and lots of free cheese samples. I was really excited to visit it for the first time in a long while a few weekends ago because I've had strawberry-rhubarb pies on my mind for a while and was really hankering for one. But after half an hour of walking around and trying to catch sight of some gorgeous ruby-colored stalks (and a very embarrassing incidence where in my eagerness I mistook some swiss chard for rhubarb...) I only found some sad, de-leafed and pale rhubarb sitting in a tub. I was out of luck.

Or so I thought! It turned out that my parents had bought a strawberry-rhubarb pie independently. Perfect.

It turned out to be the worst strawberry-rhubarb pie I've ever tasted.

Maybe I'm spoiled. Maybe I've only had them lovingly homemade by Helen Chmura and Emily Hager for sunday teas fresh out of the oven, but man, this "farmstand" pie didn't even taste like strawberry or rhubarb. It tasted like... chemicals. A closer look at the filling ingredients list proved my suspicions correct: potassium sorbate AND red #40. What on earth are those things doing in my pie?? The image of an Amish mother slowly pulling pies out of the oven was completely shattered (wait, can they even have ovens in the first place?) and replaced by an evil cackling machine dumping a whole vat of red #40 into each pie. The worst part was that I could feel the pie sitting in my stomach for the next three hours, which was a problem since I ate it at 11pm at night.

Okay, I'm exaggerating its bad qualities, but only a little.

The fact remains that this pie does not belong in a farmer's market. Sure, I may have an idealistic image of farmers markets. But I also understand that the farmers are not cottage industries making everything in small batches. They are not all like Polyface farm where everything produced there is beyond organic, has minimal carbon footprint, and absolutely delicious. Still, seeing ingredients that I would never put in my own food makes me feel cheated. Isn't the point of selling prepared foods from a market (aside from financial ones) to share a little bit of your home, of your unique recipes with other people? Maybe I'm still romanticizing here but I maintain that a huge part of the beauty of farmers markets is lost when I have to start scrutinizing ingredients lists for those long-winded ingredients that are found in my chem textbook. I do enough of that in grocery stores.