By SUSAN FRICK CARLMAN scarlman@stmedianetwork.com May 18, 2011 03:52PM I have a little confession to make: I’m kind of a local-foods geek.There’s no good explanation for this. Sure, I like a nice ripe avocado as much as the next guy, and it’s difficult to envision morning without my good friend Joe — the one who turns up steaming, and in a mug. And let’s not even start on the swoon-inducing power of good chocolate. But most things that appeal to me most can be raised or produced somewhere close to home.Some of the draw lies in the relative lack of gas fumes that come with these edibles. You’ve probably heard that most of the food showing up on the dinner table has trekked about 1,500 miles or more to get there. Seeing how much damage all that incredibly expensive gasoline does to the air we breathe, and knowing how much tastier a truly fresh tomato or tossed salad or strawberry really is, it just feels sensible to source it nearby.Although places like Chicago’s Green City Market and the off-season market held Saturday mornings at Inglenook Pantry in Geneva offer luscious tastes of local flavor throughout winter’s gloom, the opening of the main season is still a couple weeks off.The Naperville Farmers Market debuts on the first Saturday in June every year. It’s a really good one, attracting beekeepers and bakers, orchardists and ranchers, cheese mongers and floral types. Oh, and people who raise vegetables too. You can find a list that gives details about it, and all the other local markets of summer, on our website.While we always have to wait until later in the warm weeks for yummy sweet corn and those fabulous slicing tomatoes, the season is likely to see an unusually slow start this year. A woman at Keller’s Farmstand on Knoch Knolls Road told me this week that there will be asparagus one of these days, but it’s slow going. Blame April.“April is the month that really defines what you see in May and June,” Green City forager Dave Rand said recently. “So when it’s cold and rains a lot, it can really push back the date you start seeing produce.”Well, I guess we’d best not be impatient. April’s brutality still has me in a state of mild shock.Luckily, there meanwhile are ways to satisfy a hunger for hometown grub. The summer’s first really local market is open now.Farmer Jeremy Mayne outwits Mother Nature by raising a lot of tasty things in structures that look sort of like translucent Quonset huts, set up on his land at Mill Street and Bauer Road. They allow him to capture the warmth from the sun (when it feels like coming out) and hang onto it, so the seedlings can get ahead in life.Starting Friday, he’ll be bringing his honestly fresh goods to Edward Hospital every week from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m., or until the goodies run out. For now, think strawberries, asparagus, radishes, spinach, lettuces and baskets full of flowers (they’re also sold in a pole barn at the farm that’s been open on a limited schedule for the past few weeks). As the days warm up, assuming that will happen someday, there will be more delicious things showing up. Mayne and his fresh things will be found just outside the hospital cafeteria on Fridays until sometime in October.If you have a veggie garden — and you braved the elements and planted lettuce as soon as the ground could be worked, as the seed packet told you to — there might already be some tasty greens out there. Good for you. Really. But if not, there’s hope. Maybe I’ll see you over there.And we can always hit one of the local coffee shops if we’re missing Joe too much.c 2011 Sun-Times Media, LLC. All rights reserved. This material may not be copied or distributed without permission. For more information about reprints and permissions, visit http://www.suntimesreprints.com/. To order a reprint of this article, click here.
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