“There’s the whole European thing of going to the market
every day to get fresh things… If you’re a foodie and
you want good flavor, you’re going to a market.”
50 South Bay Accent
HAIR BY ROCHELLE TORRICOS, MAKEUP BY ROSE HILL
While she’s been called the godmother
of California farmers markets, had Hayden
been born with a natural knack for chemistry,
the Bay Area farmers market scene might
not be flourishing to its current degree, with
well over 100 markets operating in peak
season. Her initial goal after entering UC
Davis in the mid-ʾ70s was premed but her
first midterm results sent her in a new direction:
agricultural economics, which utilized
her math abilities. To repeat a trite phrase,
the rest is history. Or rather, herstory.
While Hayden was studying topics like
consumer behavior and demand analysis,
California farmers were largely forced
to grow their produce to fit standardized
shipping containers that went to distributors
and middlemen. “A tree-ripened peach
wasn’t marketable because it wouldn’t make
it to New York,” explains Hayden. Produce
in those days was supposed to travel long
distances and “food was ripening on trucks
instead of trees,” she notes.
An East Bay native who had always lived
in the ‘burbs, Hayden was hired in 1979
as part of a five-person team to work for
the California Department of Food and
Agriculture to implement a pet project of
Governor Jerry Brown’s, in his “Moonbeam”
days. In the midst of the gas crisis in the
late ‘70s and a cannery strike that shut
down shipping, Brown was incensed that
regulations made it difficult for farmers to
sell locally to consumers.
“He thought, how can this be in the
salad bowl of the world?” Hayden recalls.
“There’s got to be a mechanism so our family
farmers can sell their products within a
short distance and not have to abide by the
shipping standards that covered 40 percent
of the produce in America.” In those days,
up to a quarter of produce that was too big,
too small, ill-shaped, marked or sunburned
wasn’t sellable while at the same time, the
masses shopping in supermarkets “had no
idea where their food came from and how
it was grown,” she says.
AN OPEN DOOR FOR FARMERS, PRE-FOODIES
At the time of the cannery shutdowns,
notes Hayden, one desperate farmer from
north of Sacramento was arrested for selling
tree-ripened peaches on a street corner,
symbolizing how out of whack regulations
were back then. With the imprimatur to
deregulate shipping standards and much
more, Hayden performed intensive market
research, developed programs to help
consumers find sources in nearby farming
areas and, most significantly, launched the
first certified farmers market program in
the state.
Back then, just a few farmers markets
existed or were soon to be created. California’s
oldest, San Francisco’s Alemany
market, was launched in 1943, and the
city-run downtown Palo Alto market started
up in 1981. Other “original” markets were
located in Davis and San Jose. In those
days, market patrons were likely to be immigrants
looking for specialty produce or
those enlightened souls who existed long
before the term “foodie” was coined. “There
were a few people around who realized that
a peach from the supermarket was mealy
and lacked the taste peaches had in their
grandparents’ time,” explains Hayden.
After finding positive answers to the question
of how many consumers “would be
willing to do something as inconvenient
as get their food once a week at a farmers
market,” Hayden and her teammates set
up 170 markets throughout California in
eight years, she recalls. “Now, there are
close to 800 markets in California and it’s
been estimated there are a million people
shopping at a farmers market somewhere
in our state each week,” notes Hayden.
Farmers in those earlier days tended toward
monoculture, Hayden says. “They’d
have 20 acres of plums and they’d harvest
those plums in three weeks. They were lucky
if they got paid six months later,” she explains.
“That same orchard now might have
been grafted over and start producing in late
May and produce fruit through Labor Day
weekend. The farmer has cash flow. They
can sell a plum that’s too small or too big.”
Besides delivering greater flexibility to
growers, the farmers market trend has
been profitable. “We did an economic
study to show that the farmers selling
in farmers markets were able to put 56
cents out of a consumer dollar into their
pocket versus 30 cents on the traditional
market,” Hayden says. “They had immediate
payment and they didn’t have all the
added costs of the shipping.”
Certified farmers markets are those where
the farmer participants grow what they sell;
reselling produce grown by others is not allowed.
Such certification doesn’t mean the
products are organic but increasingly, such
fruit and vegetables available at Bay Area
farmers markets often are grown organically.
As Hayden describes it, the produce sold
locally “leans toward flavor and freshness
rather than cosmetic beauty,” which is fine
with the health-conscious throngs patronizing
regional farmers markets.
When Hayden first started setting up
certified farmers markets in the state—a
mammoth job involving permits, marketing,
endless negotiations and more—she
used her economic training to study the optimal
audience and then, as now, she notes,
“the big factor is still education” when it
comes to who will shop at a farmers market,
which helps explain the Bay Area farmers
market revolution over the past 40 years.
Most cities in the region have a market now
and some have several.
In the beginning, Hayden recalls, “When
we’d set up a popular market, other communities
would say, ‘We want a market
like that one.’ ’’ Many early markets were
held in fairgrounds, municipal parking
lots and similar locations. More recently,
with regional malls being decimated by
online shopping, those entities are requesting
people-generating farmers markets be
held on their property, she reports.
EXPANDING VENUES AND PRODUCTS
Behind the success of the state’s farmers
markets is California’s glorious climate for
growing crops. “We have melons one hour
away and berries on the coast an hour the
other way,” she notes, which makes the state
the envy of some other parts of the world
that would like more homegrown farmers
markets. “Canadians are so jealous,” says
Hayden. “They have just one microclimate.