Pocket Markets: Local Food from the Street Corner

Imagine this local food scenario: you walk up to a house in the deep evening. Moving up the walkway, you notice a vegetable garden in ruins. It is almost November, after all. Dying sunflowers bow their heads to you as you walk to the front porch and ring the bell. Someone answers. You exchange money and walk off with some homemade vegan yogurt. The transaction is complete.

Or this one: walking along the street with your kids, you notice a stand by the side of the road. Local food? Well, lemonade, of course. As you approach, you notice that it is not lemonade at all, but swiss chard, kale, and lettuce. The kids are excited, you give them the money, and another transaction takes place. The chard? It gets eaten for dinner.

Pocket markets and street stalls are something that we in urban areas might consider to be a thing of the past. The itinerant street vendor now sells hot dogs, with a license, mostly to hungry office workers. But the local apple grower does not stand on a street corner, nor does the chard-grower or the yogurt-maker. Perhaps this is because growing apples, chard, and making yogurt don't tend to be great money-makers in Northern cities. It's also because many of these actions are not legal, or at least they are deeply frowned upon by the powers-that-be. Yet with the burgeoning interest in local food, micro-scale food processing and production is returning to neighborhoods, very quietly.

What are the challenges that local food producers face? We live in a culture of food safety, and this is not a bad thing. However, formal, long, and expensive licensing procedures do tend to scare off potential pocket marketers. They just can't afford to be certified for a twice-a-year swiss chard stand. Relocalizing food requires a different approach, perhaps. It might be a simple license. It could be the opening of commonly used and rented community kitchens located in suburbs, so that micro food processors can do their work in a certified kitchen. It might be trusting local people to use their judgment of food safety and risk, just as they would at a potluck.

There are also challenges in the way our neighborhoods are set up. People are in their cars. Suburbs have land to grow food, but many people commute from those suburbs to the big city, and they do so in their vehicles. There's no time to stop by a local street stall. Instead, there are drive throughs. In some ways, pocket markets provide a refreshing local food backlash to the drive through. Pocket markets encourage people to get to know their neighborhood in all of its glorious edibility, by walking.

Pocket markets allow people to share the micro-resources in a community. An apple tree has too many apples? Give them to a neighbor or share them at a roadside stand. You love to bake? Make a little baking business for a niche market. In a pocket market, there is so much potential for building community and building a network of sustainable food. We just need to open our minds - and our neighborhoods - to this micro-scale food production.