Everywhere I go, my wife and I seem to find ourselves wandering aisles of fruit, vegetables, meat and seafood, cheeses and breads and more. But most often, aside from our local weekend Greenmarket in Brooklyn, our stroll is in the huge and chaotic big-city markets.
But this blog is about a different kind of market. It's not small, but it's not huge. It's got a wide variety of produce and products, but it limits itself to what is grown and made within 30 miles of its lakeside pavilion on Cayuga Lake in Ithaca. As you'll see, that doesn't make it bland or lacking in exotic tastes.
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We visited it in early October, while in Ithaca to visit the Museum of the Earth. It was a great time to be there: some of the brighter colors of summer were still there in pyramids of peppers and tomatoes, but the duskier, quieter colors of fall were in view everywhere—and the new season's apples were in in many varieties. Unfortunately, we were so busy selecting samples, I appear not to have photographed them!
Unlike many markets that can claim centuries on the same spot, the Ithaca market is just over 40 years old, and has been at its present site for only 25. The market pavilion is large and impressive, but doesn't really resemble the 13th-century cathedral the Market claims it's modeled after. Between the market at the Pavilion, which runs weekends from early spring to late fall and the indoor sites elsewhere in the city, it's become a year-round operation.
Besides its emphasis on local produce and crafts, the market is also big on recycling and avoiding landfill; all vendors use compostable utensils and materials, and the market is full of signs for groups working on and encouraging recycling and composting. I love puns, so this one appealed to me:
Here's a sample of what we saw; the picture at the top was chosen because it seemed only fair: when do parsnips EVER get top billing? We traveled home with bags of beets, tomatoes, squash, maple syrup, apples and the most wonderful wax beans, telling ourselves that if we lived in Ithaca, we'd be living at the market. Enjoy!
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