Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

It’s fascinating how much this can change if you find a good source for local stuff. Tomatoes go from uniformly-sized red food pellets to a huge variety of sizes and colors with a lot more flavor to them. I miss having a farmer’s market two blocks from my place with a heirloom tomato specialist showing up regularly.

View on HN

As a European, food at the farmer’s market is usually cheaper in Europe because we cut the middleman and go straight to the producer. Somehow in the US, it’s more expensive instead because “artisanal”, “organic” and so on.

As such, in the US, farmer markets always feel like a scam to me.

Food at US farmer markets are cheaper if two conditions are met: firstly, going to an actual farmers market which tends to be far out of town, secondly, only buying in season produce without hydroponics.

In the US, I live about 100km outside of a major city, so the farms are next door and the food is tasty.

That said, it's really difficult to convince someone to drive 100km to get a normal ordinary head of lettuce with dirt attached to it so they set up stalls inside the city for top selling 'organic artisanal' items that come in nice display cases.

In both the US and (at least parts of) Europe you have two types of "Farmers markets". One where actual farmers sell in season produce from their actual farm, and one where middlemen buy/import stuff from all over the place and resell it in a market like setting. In both cases the first one is cheap and the second one is expensive.

More of a scam than you think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYwB63YslbA

Didn't realize until reading the child comment that there were middlemen. I live in a rural area in the US: the people selling at farmer's markets around here are almost always the people who grew the food.

A lot of farms have stands set up on the road unattended, with a price list: you buy eggs, veggies, etc. on the honor system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com