There is something tender about the way people hold food at the farmers market.
A bunch of broccoli is gathered in both hands like flowers. Tomatoes rest in open palms. Green beans, peppers, and squash are held against the chest so none escape.
These are ordinary groceries, yet for a few seconds, they are precious. Even an ear of corn receives the careful touch usually reserved for something fragile.
Perhaps it should.
The shopper’s hands are the last in a long line of hands that brought the food to Westerville. Someone prepared the soil, planted, weeded, and watched the weather. Someone picked what was ready, washed away the dirt, packed the truck, and arranged the morning’s harvest beneath a market canopy.
On Labor Day weekend, that chain of work becomes especially visible.
Shoppers arrive carrying the proceeds of their own labor. Across the table is food produced by someone else’s. Money passes into one set of hands. Food passes into another. Each is the product of work.
Green onions and asparagus are cradled with two hands. An ear of corn needs only one. Broccoli is held upright like a bouquet, although few bouquets improve as much after roasting with olive oil, salt and pepper.
Other purchases require a balancing act. A cup of morning coffee fills one hand while the other balances peppers, a tomato and a basket of green beans against the body. Nothing is dropped. The coffee survives. Breakfast and dinner leave the market together.
Perhaps the gentlest hands belong to the shopper holding a plastic bag filled with a warm rainbow of cherry tomatoes. She carries them as though the tomatoes are asleep, undisturbed.
Color moves through the morning as vividly as the food. Red fingernails wrap around green broccoli. A turquoise shirt sits behind green onions. Yellow squash rests against blue fabric. A red Cincinnati shirt becomes the background for green beans, peppers, and tomatoes.
This may be a coincidence. It appears that some shoppers dress in complementary colors for the crops they intend to buy.
But the hands tell us more than the colors do.
Food bought at a farmers market can feel more personal than food lifted from a refrigerated grocery display. Here, buyer and grower can stand within speaking distance of each other. The person taking the money produced what is being sold.
That closeness makes visible something easy to forget.
Food does not suddenly appear overnight beneath bright lights in a produce aisle. Before anything reaches our hands, someone must grow it, gather it, sort it, pack it and bring it to market.
The price of a tomato pays for work we never see: growing it, tending it, picking it, and bringing it to market. Modern grocery stores make that labor easy to overlook. Seasons blur when food can always be brought in from somewhere else.
The farmers market shortens that distance. It can put the grower and the eater on opposite sides of the same table.
Labor Day gives us reason to notice the exchange. The holiday may pause work, but crops keep growing.
So before eating my way through the market, I will look again at the hands. They hold food produced through someone else’s labor and purchased with the proceeds of their own. Money passes one way. Food passes the other. Both are handled with care.
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