At Greg’s behest, we rolled out to the Inner Sunset Farmer’s Market yesterday.
Set in that parking lot between that shoe store and that doomed brewery, by the time we got there (around 10) it was packed. We’re all for the propagation of the species, but must you use your stroller as a weapon, sir or ma’am? Seriously.
Even with the obstacle course of strollers, people who apparently can’t text and walk at the same time, and the little kid who lay down and refused to get back up (hmm, maybe those strollers are pretty rad after all), it was pretty easy to get down one side and back up the other. Compared to other, more labyrinthine markets we’ve been to, this one was a piece of cake to navigate.
There was a lot of fresh produce, some of it more easily quantified (Organic? How far has it traveled? All that Barbara Kingsolver bullshit) than others. Not to be all “the Ferry Building” but those little signs the FB has at every stand giving baseball card style stats on vendors really helps us make purchasing decisions. Ha! Do you like how we act like we are these big time produce buyers? But you know what we mean.
And samples were plentiful, the hallmark of a good farmers market. To make it great, here’s what we suggest:
- The aforementioned stats cards. Really, they’re cool.
- More trash cans. We couldn’t find any public cans, though many vendors brought their own. But if you stepped away from their booth, you were shit outta luck. At one point, we heard a guy say “I’ve been holding this fucking olive pit for 10 minutes and I just can’t do it anymore,” as he threw it on the ground. It must be terrible to suffer from that type of muscle weakness, but, yeah, copious and visible trash cans would have been great.
- A wider variety of vendors. Cheese was unrepresented, and the dried/preserved arts under so. We would have happily traded yet another stand of peaches for something like that.
Does it sound like we’re nitpicking? Because that’s not our intention — this was a bang-up job for a first effort, and made for a great neighborhoodie time. And folks as far out as 46th, where we ended up having brunch, were buzzing about it. We ran into old and new friends, but a bunch of cherries, and some Presidio Heights honey. And we expect we’ll be back, every Sunday until Nov 22. some time between 9-1.
All photos by Tim Ehhalt, see the entire photoset here.
