Here is a fresh food market below the entrance to the Great Wall, about 45 minutes from Beijing. The variety of kinds of dried and fresh fruit, as well as nuts was impressive. Just as with the other vendors in the bizarre, the standard operating procedure is "Let's make a deal." There were also street vendors in Beijing who rode on mobile produce stands - selling their wares on street corners, outside restaurants or other stores.
These street sales in China are no different than the ones I have seen elsewhere, like this one north of Visalia, California - on the road that runs between my parents' old farm and my hometown. I know this produce wasn't produced locally, because the middle of March is too early in Central California for local strawberries. Most likely these came off a truck from southern California, or even Mexico. So much for local food in this case, and I sure don't know where the Great Wall and Beijing produce came from - other than from a grocery store - and given that there are bananas, I am sure from some distant place.
All this brings me to some interesting information that was presented at the local and regional food research conference I attended last week. One of the plenary speakers, Clare Hinrichs, a well know rural sociologist at Pennsylvania State University, gave a presentation about the social dynamics of local food producers and consumers. One of the aspects of the increase in popularity for locally produced foods by consumers is a desire to know where the food came from, who produced it, and how it was produced. There are a range of opinions for why this is, but one often given reason is a desire by consumers to connect with the farmer who produced the food. This desire goes beyond "know your farmer" and extends a desire for relationships. This is interesting because some studies also show that not all farmers necessarily want a relationship - that they have enough to do just to farm, much less get to know who buys their products. All-in-all, there is something going on with people who sense a need for connections with others, and things are not getting better for Americans. A paper that Clare cited was: "Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades" by Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew Barshers that appeared in the American Sociological Review, 2006, 71:353-375.
See the publication at:
http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/June06ASRFeature.pdf
A statistic that floored me was that 43% of the U.S. population now has only one or no confidant to discuss important matters - there has been a tripling of isolation in the last 20 years. Much of this loss has been due to a loss of connection in voluntary associations and neighborhoods. For some, a vision for building connections and reversing that trend is to have better ties between buyers of food and those who produce that food, with the reason given that food is so fundamental to life. It seems that regardless of the downward trend in the number of meaningful relationships that Americans have, somewhere imbedded in us is a desire to do better than that.
What is interesting to me is an observation Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mother Theresa made more than 20 years ago about Americans. In a 1986 documentary film I saw about her, she made the comment when visiting New York City that Americans are suffering a different kind of poverty than the people she ministers to - Americans suffer a poverty of loneliness. If this was apparent then - more than 20 years ago - how much more so now - 20 years later - with data and analyses to substantiate that claim - that folks desiring to see change must realize that people need more than food alone to live.
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