The borough council in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, unanimously passed an ordinance in April aimed at making at least one of the two farmers markets in town live up to its name. The Saturday market would be a venue where farmers would sell directly to consumers only produce they had actually grown, the council declared.
The town’s Wednesday market would continue operating, as both markets had for years, as a “farmers market” in name only. There, vendors peddling wholesale produce would be free to continue swindling those shoppers who are drawn to the venue under the impression that they’re buying fresh-picked produce direct from local farms.
Some peddlers in Bellefonte are outraged at the infringement on their rights, and a sympathetic local politician has vowed to undo the rule. In the meantime, a reporter from the Centre Daily Times, in State College, Penn., discovered on a visit to the Saturday market that some peddlers have been brazenly defying the law.
“Gary Horner, of Spring Mills, has been selling vegetables and fruits at the market since 1972, and he says the changes have touched off an atmosphere of jealousy among the vendors. ‘It's not like it was,’ he says of the convivial market he remembers.
“Horner [claims that he] grows some of the produce -- cabbage, cucumbers, zucchini and onions -- but the peaches, melons and beets that often fill his tables he gets from other sources, and so, technically, he shouldn't be offering them on Saturdays. But he still does, pointing out there's no way for the borough to police the farms. Plus, he says, his customers look for certain things both in and out of season. ‘If they're good tomatoes, customers don't care,’ he said. ‘They want what they want’.”
As if on cue, a customer chimed in to insist that Horner's produce is the best at the market. But other shoppers told the reporter that they patronized the market because they wanted to know where their food came from and because they wanted to support local farmers.
A clueless councilman, Joe Beigle, is dead set on eliminating the ‘producer-only’ restriction at the market. He complained that keeping peddlers out of the markets drives prices up and sends vendors to other markets.
Actually, allowing cut-rate, out-of-season wholesale produce into “farmers markets” drives the real farmers out and the quality down. And it leaves well-intentioned shoppers who get wind of the scam feeling like they’ve just been robbed.
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