Recapturing Food at the Market

—Stephanie Shapiro

Stephanie Shapiro has been a Market regular for nearly 40 years. She lives in Tuxedo Park with husband Tom and dog Archie.

If you’re a patron of the 32nd Street Farmers Market, you’re already making the world greener. For one thing, it’s far more sustainable to buy locally-grown apples at the market than to buy apples shipped to a big-chain grocery store from Washington State. The more local the apple, the smaller the carbon footprint left by long-distance transportation.

But a farmers market where “reduce, reuse and recycle” is the mantra goes far beyond the sale of local produce.Tabulating a market’s green quotient is not just a one-to-one comparison to the “food miles” racked up by cross-country deliveries to grocery stores.Think of the market as an ecosystem that encourages vendors and shoppers alike to further minimize greenhouse gas emissions in multiple ways.

32nd Street Farmers Market staff and board members have employed multiple strategies for reducing the market’s carbon footprint, from installing nearby bike racks  for cyclists to a cardboard recycling program for vendors who bring their baked goods and other offerings to market in boxes.

Many 32nd Street vendors support market management’s goals in a variety of ways. Even though they’re much more expensive, “I use paper bags instead of plastic whenever I can,” says Cindy Yingling of Glenville Hollow Farms. Her patrons return glass jelly jars as well as egg cartons from different business as well as hers. “I put a big Glenville Hollow sticker on it and cover it up,” she says. Customers also come to Cindy with recycled plastic clamshells, which she refills with blueberries and other produce.

Glenville Hollow Farms accepts returned jars for jams and jellies.

Numerous vendors, including South Mountain Creamery and HEX Ferments, accept empty bottles and jars from previous purchases. San Giovanni’s Organic Farm uses commercially compostable containers for salad greens and Italian bakery Doppio Pasticceria dispenses “walk-around” reusable forks for portable munching. 

HEX Ferments’ bottle return deposit program for kombucha has existed since it opened at the market.

Consumers of Tom Cat’s Kitchen’s prepared food bring back reusable containers, owner Anna Kent says. After sanitizing each returned container, it is reused in a “closed loop system” that minimizes packaging waste and supports a “more circular economy.” What’s more, as a plant-based enterprise, Anna asserts that Tom Cat’s offerings “generally require fewer natural resources and generate lower greenhouse gas emissions than animal-based food.”

At the end of the market day, several vendors, including Blondie’s Doughnuts and Blacksauce Kitchen, contribute to the closed loop system by dumping leftover food scraps into bins provided on site by a food recapture program run out of Baltimore City’s Office of Sustainability.  

Then, there are the vendors of products that in and of themselves are environmentally sound, including Mt. Royal Soaps and Gardeners Gourmet, whose customers can return the stubs of the spent beeswax candles they purchased.

Behind the scenes, discussions on how to make 32nd Street Farmers Market even greener are constant, staff and supporters say. Last summer’s extreme heat and winter’s extreme cold have made these conversations all the more urgent. The talk tends to focus not just on whether individual vendors use compostable bags but on broader changes such as how to reduce the amount of bulk materials vendors use or pivot toward more reusable bins. It takes continuing research, trial and error, and education to make the market more green.

San Giovanni’s encourages the return of its compostable containers.