Though few of us may stop to consider the fact, the modern farmers market is the true market of humanity. The vast, fluorescent, all-in-one supermarkets where most of us buy our groceries are of a species only about 65-years-old. They were born out of the boom of technology, cars, and suburbs that became the West’s reward for winning the Second World War. They were a dramatic upheaval, and it’s a testament to their power that so many of us today see them as the default
purveyor of food.
But the farmers market is the original market. It’s the market that grew up along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. It’s the market that still delivers the goods on most corners of Earth. And—with a simple obviousness that should make us stop and consider just how marketing psychology and a buck have shaped America—it’s the market that provides poor people all over the world with good, healthy food. Only in America are the poorest people the fattest. Elsewhere, they pay their neighbors for vegetables picked this morning and a chicken killed last night.
But some unsung, heroic bureaucrats in D.C. are getting it together. The Feds have committed $4 Million Dollars to equip the country’s 7,100 farmers markets with the apps and bandwidth to process food stamps. Food stamps aren’t really stamps anymore, they are electronic credits distributed among a few acronymic programs like the EBT and WIC. Right now, less than a quarter of those 7,100 markets are able to swipe plastic cards and send a series of digits zinging through wires to a database somewhere. Enter Big Government and their aim to add another 4,000 markets to that list. And enter a company named the Novo Dia Group that has developed an iPhone app to take the process wireless.