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Health & Fitness

This Week at the Smart Markets Oakton Farmers' Market

A look at some old newspaper clippings suggests that we've made little progress in addressing our country's poor eating habits.

This Week at our Oakton Market
Saturday 10 a.m.–2 p.m.
2854 Hunter Mill Road
Map

Hear ye! Hear ye! It is quite possible that we will be flush with new vendors this week, so I want to introduce you to them in advance. You might want to make a list.

Cavanna Pasta is back! With a full selection of handmade pastas, sauces and dinners brought to us by Kathleen Jorgensen, an old friend from markets past.

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Celtic Pasties: Handmade for handheld eating, the original olde English fast food updated by our own English gentleman with creative and delicious fillings. This week he will be bringing Beef, Pork and Apple, All Day Breakfast, Early Thanksgiving, Cheese and Onion and Spinach and Feta. Take some home for lunch or munch your way through the market.

Tony Fetters Fruit Farm: Dave Fetters will be bringing a great assortment of apples but also an incredible array of fruit products including baked goods such as apple cake and apple and pumpkin whoopie pies. Look for applesauce, canned peaches, honey, tart cherry juice, spicy peach BBQ sauce, peach daiquiri mix, peach-strawberry jam, apple cider in several “flavors” and apple, peach, pear and pumpkin butters.

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Old Favorites:

Peachtree Street Sweets: Rashmi Deshpande, our newest home baker and recently transplanted from Atlanta, will bring Chocolate Chocolate-Chip Cookies, Pumpkin Cranberry Walnut Bread, Berry Muffins, Chocolate Almond Muffin Bites, and Nutty Biscotti.

Sweet Hearts Patisserie: Kristen will bring pumpkin caramel, bourbon pecan, red velvet, and almond apricot Petit Fours; pumpkin maple and dark chocolate cake truffles; orange cranberry tea cake; and dark chocolate and salted caramel French macarons.

Max Tyson will have cider and that great unsweetened applesauce from Max Sr.’s own kitchen.

Nevin hopes to send some fresh pork this week if it is indeed ready at the butchers on Friday. And Heritage Farm is still taking orders for fresh, free-range turkeys, though they are out of the Bourbon Red Heritage breed.

Betty will be with us with salsas and guacamole, chicken and cheese enchiladas and tamales!

On thing is certain — none of our shoppers will need to bake for Thanksgiving! And that includes me!

From the Market Master

Dear Shopper,

Those of you who have been reading these newsletters for several years now know that I am an inveterate clipper of newspaper and magazine articles, which I eventually use to inform my writing or to give or send to others who might be interested in them. In order to make room for new files, I have been clearing out old ones, and this past weekend I went through a box of clippings from the late ’90s and early 2000s.

Boy is it amazing to see what was on our minds 10 years ago — especially since they were most often the same things that are on our minds now. The concerns seem to be the same; only the science has propelled the discussion in interesting directions, often leaving us only slightly ahead of where we were. One article of interest which was not dated but quoted from a study done in 1999 was printed in the Wall Street Journal with the headline “Cafeteria Food Fight.” It reported that school districts were moving toward hosting fast-food vendors and bringing vending machines into their school cafeterias because of the money it brought in.

A companion article titled “Schools Teach Kids to Give Peas a Chance” focused on programs that were teaching cooking and nutrition in school to help students learn on their own how to eat healthier. It advised that “Making lunch part of the schools’ educational mission, instead of an ancillary service, could help remove the economic pressures that drive lunch programs to serve pizza and french fries.” In East Harlem, students were even visiting local farms, and the parents were given half-shares in CSAs for their volunteer time with a program called Cook Shop.

Then there was the article from Modern Maturity, November 1996, about two “recent” scientific discoveries that linked nutrition and overall health. “One is that many chronic degenerative diseases are largely caused or influenced by free radicals that are produced by tobacco smoke and other pollutants, as well as by normal body processes. The other factor giving nutrition a boost is that scientists now better understand how DNA becomes damaged and subsequently creates cancer cells.” The study posited that “nutritional deficiencies are to blame for much of the damage.” The article then ends with recommendations for healthier eating — all of which except one are supported by more modern research.

We certainly have moved away from fast food in our school cafeterias but have not made many inroads when it comes to education about nutrition in the classroom. It seems to have taken way too long in the face of incredibly increasing childhood obesity statistics to introduce nutrition into the classroom. Just think of the money we would have saved already in ten years on health care if we had worked harder then ever to stabilize the rate. Instead, in 2208, 18 percent of children ages six to 11 were overweight, up from 13 percent in 1999. And while the science is now instructing us to get our nutrition from food rather than supplements, we are less healthy than we were when that Modern Maturity article was written.

How hard can it be to change the lunches served in our cafeterias? And how expensive can it be to introduce some basic instruction in nutrition and eating healthy at home into our classroom curricula? Whatever the cost in your time and mine — and in our tax money — would surely be worth every dime. And what an investment it would be in the collective personal and public health of our population.

My mother always said that we live and learn — I’m beginning to wonder about that. Let me know what you think.

See you at the market!

Jean

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