The Foodie Tot is not the only one excited about the opportunity to profess his love for the markets during National Farmers Market Week. There are not one but two separate online contests underway asking voters to chose their favorite farmers market. To me, that’s like asking a parent to name their favorite child. Sure, there are markets I adore (see: Oregon travelogues ‘08 and ‘09) that truly have it all — wide array of organic-certified products, cooking demos, kid-friendly activities, transparent management and communication — but the obligation of eating locally requires one to support the markets in your neighborhood, and there are things we love about each of them besides the simple matter of proximity and convenience. There are two farmers markets here in Alexandria that are between our house and the nearest grocery stores, so it is even harder to justify passing up the market in favor of flavorless supermarket produce. We love Bigg Riggs’ array of apples and peaches, Kuhn’s sweet berries and plums, Three Way Farm’s luscious melons, Smith Meadows’ grass-fed beef and handmade pastas, Tom’s cave-aged cheddar, Grace’s pumpkin loaf, and many more products and producers from across the region.

The Farmers Market Coalition, who notes that the number of farmers markets in the U.S. has increased by 170% in the past 10 years, recently asked “Why do you love your farmers market?” My response: “Because my son knows his cheesemaker, his apple growers, and his meat producers by name.”

I’ve written before about the many lessons kids can learn by shopping at the market, but the most important is an understanding and appreciation of where their food comes from. We certainly don’t have time to go to the farm every week, and together my son and I can’t even manage to keep an herb pot alive, so we will drag ourselves out rain or shine to support the farmers who wake up before dawn, after a hard week of manual labor, to truck their wares into town.

I do support any effort that makes people more aware of their neighborhood farmers markets, so go to the Care2/LocalHarvest contest (where the winning market receives $5,000) and the American Farmland Trust contest (winning markets get free No Farms No Food tote bags) to vote for your favorite markets, if you can choose just one. Of course you can share the love and vote for different markets in each, if you like. (The Care2 poll is open until Sept. 17, but the AFT contest ends at midnight this Saturday, August 8, so vote today!)

Don’t Forget! Submit a photo of your tot(s) at the market to the Foodie Tots <3 Farmers Markets Flickr pool during the week (August 2-9) and you’ll have a chance to win a kid-sized reusable market tote filled with foodie goodies. For an extra entry into the drawing, blog about your local farmers market with a link back to this post &/or retweet a link to the “Foodie Tots <3 Farmers Markets” contest. More bonus points for sharing why you love your farmers market.

P.S. Today’s market stop was the Upper King Street Market, for ground buffalo meat from Cibola (burgers coming up soon), Shlagel raspberries, Bigg Riggs peaches, Tom’s yogurt, and a muffin and fresh-squeezed orange juice (er, not exactly local) for an afternoon snack.

And it’s Real Food Wednesday, so head over to the round up at Kelly the Kitchen Kop for more real, local food ideas and inspiration.

This is opening weekend at many local farmers markets — including Arlington’s Columbia Pike, Alexandria’s West End, Fairfax County markets and 14th & U in the District — and what better way to prepare than to point you to some online sources of locavore info and fellow local food enthusiasts. If you don’t have a Twitter account, what are you waiting for? Seriously though, if you don’t have an account you can still follow interesting Twitter users by clicking that orange RSS button at the right side of their page; this will subscribe you to their updates in your feed reader, just like you follow your favorite blogs. Over on Twitter, each week users share some of their favorite friends (”tweeps”) in an event called “Follow Friday.” Here’s my farmers market/local foods edition. This is far from an extensive list, so please feel free to identify yourself or add your favorites in the comments.

Farmers Markets & Local Food Resources on Twitter

Chesapeake Bay foodshed

• Edible Chesapeake magazine (@EdChes)
• What’s to Eat Baltimore (@whatstoeatbmore)
• On the Gourmet, mobile market, Va. (@chrisguerre)
• Great Country Farms, Va. (@thefarmersays)
• Smith Family Farm, Va. (@smithfamilyfarm)
• The Crab Place, Md. (@thecrabplace)
• Clyde’s restaurants (@clydes)
• sweetgreen restaurants (@sweetgreen)

Around the US

• Portland (Ore.) Farmers Markets (@portlandfarmers)
• Edible San Francisco magazine (@EdibleSF)
• Brooklyn Farmhouse blog (@bklynfarmhouse)
• Local Family, Local Beet (Chicago) blog (@localfamily)
• Earth Eats: Real Food, Green Living (Indiana) blog/podcast (@eartheats)
• Local Flavor Knoxville (Tennessee) (@localflavorknox)
• Eating Niagara (Ontario) blog (@eatingniagara)

National Resources

• Edible Communities magazines (@ediblestories)
• La Vida Locavore, food & ag policy blog (@locavoreblog)
• Farmers Markets Today magazine (@farmersmktstoday)
• Local Harvest, local foods directory (@localharvestorg)
• Eating Well magazine (@eatingwell)
• Go Locavore blog (@golocavore)
• Locallectual, online directory (@locallectural)
• Enjoy Locavore, the iPhone app (@enjoylocavore)

District-area foodies who occasionally tweet from the markets:

• Arugula Files (@arugulafiles)
• Capital Spice (@capitalspice)
• Counter Intelligence (@melissamccart)
• Farmette Report (@farmettereport)
• Metrocurean (@metrocurean)
• The Bitten Word (@bittenword)
• Alinea at Home’s @CarolBlymire
• and me, @foodietot (no “s”)

Elsewhere on the web, Alexandria’s West End market has a new blog on Culinate. DC’s FreshFarm markets does not (yet?) have a blog but has an extensive database of their market vendors. The Washington Post food section’s newly-launched blog has a category titled “To Market, To Market,” so I hope that’s a sign they’re planning some farmers market coverage. (And WaPo food editor Joe Yonan is on twitter, too, @joeyonan.)

While we’re on the subject, I’m sure you’re already subscribed to the FoodieTots feed, but please note that you can now receive automatic email updates whenever we post something new. And if Twitter’s not your thing, you can also follow us on Facebook. Whatever method you choose, please touch base on Monday and let me know what you found at your local markets this weekend. Happy eating, locally!

Part V of the Sustainable Family Supper series, and my submission to this week’s Fight Back Friday, hosted by the Food Renegade.

It’s probably obvious by now that we are not vegetarians by any means. I actually did abstain from red meat for nearly 5 years during my idealistic youth (high school and college) for “ethical” reasons, but was converted back during a Christmas visit to my Italian grandparents who served meat three times a day. My now husband, then friend, took me out for my first post-vegetarianism steak when I got back to college after the winter break. I was ecstatic to finally be able to order In-n-Out burgers with meat, and jumped back into omnivorism with barely a second thought. Fast forward nearly a decade, and my renewed interest in healthy, sustainable food led me to read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I’d already sampled local, grass-fed meats from local farmers markets on occasion, but wasn’t fully committed to paying the higher price on a regular basis. Pollan’s book and my subsequent research set the ball rolling and we now strive to eat only grass-fed, pastured, hormone-free and preferably organic (and GMO-feed free) meat. I still have a little omnivore’s guilt when eating lamb or veal (cue cute baby animal images), but I was inspired to hear local sustainable agriculture hero Bev Eggleston speak at a Slow Food dinner last year about his own conversion from Berkeley vegetarian to pig farmer. As he explained, to solve the problems of conventional meat production you have to participate in the process and use your dollars to vote for sustainable solutions.

Why Grass-Fed, aka Pastured, Meat? Without getting into the complex and hotly-debated issue of whether grass-fed cows fart more than feedlot-cows (yes, there are real scientists researching that!), there are true health benefits to grass-fed meat. Plus, you avoid supporting “Confined Animal Feeding Operations” (CAFOs or feedlots), which are essentially concentration camps for animals and which I am sure you have heard about elsewhere. (If not, read this, this, and/or this.) Other benefits include:

• Grass-fed meat is higher in vitamins, especially vitamin E and D, which only comes from exposure to sunlight.
• Grass-fed red meat is leaner, lower in fat and calories than conventional, and higher in better fats (Omega-3s).
• Grass-fed means no genetically-modified (GMO) corn or soy feed, reducing the amount of corn byproducts (pesticides, chemical fertilizers, etc.) you consume. (You have seen King Corn, haven’t you?) – health benefits via Eat Wild.

One thing to note about grass-fed meat is that in much of the U.S., it is a seasonal product. Alice Waters reportedly turned down EcoFriendly’s meat for her Inaugural dinner event because it was not available fresh in January. In the winter, animals can’t always graze outdoors so be sure to ask your local vendors what they’re feeding in the winter months — ideally, it will be organic feed they grow themselves. If it is entirely grass-fed, you’ll probably have to buy it frozen. Just defrost it gently in the refrigerator and be sure not to overcook (medium rare is ideal), as leaner grass-fed meat becomes tough if overcooked.

Where to find grass-fed meat: The first place to look for local, grass-fed meat is your local farmers markets. Visit localharvest.org to find a market or ranch near you; Eat Wild’s state-by-state grass-fed directory can also help. At the grocery store, ignore the meaningless “all natural” label and choose organic if you can, but ask the butcher if they carry any grass-fed brands. (If not, ask them to consider it!)

Grass-fed Meat in DC/NoVA: Joel Salatin’s Polyface, featured in Omnivore’s Dilemma, is right here in Virginia, and you can purchase their meats through their buying clubs. Bev Eggleston’s EcoFriendly co-operative is created in the Polyface model (Bev worked with Joel before branching out on his own) and is the gold standard for family-farmed, pastured meat in the area, with many of DC’s and NYC’s top chefs relying on EcoFriendly meats (including Cathal Armstrong at Restaurant Eve and Todd Gray of Equinox). Other smaller, family-owned farms are represented at nearly all of our local farmers markets. I’ve personally sampled and recommend the following:

• Babes in the Woods, (Dillwyn, VA); rare-breed, forest-fed pork; at Old Town Alexandria, Clarendon and Charlottesville Farmers Markets.
• Cibola Farms (Culpeper, VA); buffalo, pork, beef, goat, chicken; available at Dupont, Penn Quarter, Mt. Pleasant, Kingstowne, Burke, Falls Church, Reston, Dale City, Mt. Vernon, Fredericksburg Farmers Markets.
• EcoFriendly (Moneta, VA), beef, pork, lamb, poultry, rabbit, Arlington/Courthouse and Dupont Farmers Markets.
• Fields of Athenry (Purcellville, VA); lamb, beef, poultry; see website for drop-off locations.
• Hilldale Farm (Palmyra, VA); organic chicken; at West End Alexandria Farmers Market.
• Smith Meadows Farm (Berryville, VA); beef, pork, lamb, chicken, turkey, goat; at Chevy Chase, Courthouse, Columbia Pike, Del Ray, Dupont, Falls Church, Glover Park, Palisades, Takoma Park Farmers Markets.
• Smith Family Farm, (Gainseville, VA); beef, pork, poultry; at Burke, Kingstowne, Occoquan, Palisades, Vienna Farmers Markets – and on Twitter!

Local (NoVA) Butchers:

• Let’s Meat on the Avenue, butcher shop in Del Ray, VA, selling hormone-free grass-fed meat, much from Virginia’s Fauquier and Loudoun Counties, including Ayrshire Farm’s organic, heritage-breed chickens.
• Organic Butcher of McLean, McLean, VA.

And look for the Spring issue of Edible Chespeake, with a cover story on buying beef directly from the farmer.

It’s been a rainy spring thus far in the Washington area, and I keep reminding myself that April showers bring May strawberries, June blueberries, and so on. Cherry blossoms have bloomed, and bringing even more reason for cheer, April marks the first re-openings of our area’s seasonal farmers markets.

Last week saw the opening of DC Fresh Farm’s Foggy Bottom (Wednesday) and Penn Quarter (Thursday) markets, and this coming Saturday is the official re-opening of my neighborhood market, the Del Ray Farmers Market in Alexandria. Judging from the lines at Smith Meadows’ stand lately at our “secret” winter market, Saturday is sure to be busy so get there early for the best selection. Mr. Biggs has already been back with greenhouse-grown tomatoes that will help tide you over till summer. And for other markets in the area, Fairfax County markets open the first week in May and the Alexandria Upper King Street market doesn’t open until June. See the end of this post for a complete list of opening dates.

Opening Day Find – Morels! Last Thursday at Penn Quarter’s grand opening, I snagged some of the first morels of the season from the Mushroom Lady; they will be available in greater quantities in the next few weeks. There were plenty of fresh greens to be had, but no signs of asparagus quite yet. Last year’s apples and pears are on their last legs, but fresh strawberries are still a few weeks away.

As the market season kicks into gear, watch for new features here at FoodieTots, particularly for those of you in the Northern VA/DC area. In an effort to make room for new resources on the sidebar, I’ve moved and expanded my “Eat Local, Elsewhere” blog list to the “Locavore Links” tab up above. Check it out and let me know of other locavore bloggers I should be following. Thanks as always for reading, and stay dry out there!

Read on for the complete Northern Virginia Farmers Market 2009 Schedule…

(more…)