Global Pandemic, Local Food: The Unsung Heroes of the Berkeley Farmers’ Markets

Sunset at the South Berkeley Tuesday market

In the seemingly endless list of everyday practices interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, shopping for food has been, for many, a source of stress and difficulty. Border closures and trade restrictions have disrupted global food chains and affected millions of farmers, farmworkers, and consumers. In a joint press release from October 2020, the World Health Organization predicted that the number of undernourished people — already over 690 million — could increase by up to 132 million by the end of 2020. Our food systems, subject to our current industrialized agriculture practices, have been thrust into the spotlight and the underlying shortcomings exposed.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown global and domestic food systems into disarray, smaller producers have stepped up, particularly in one cherished hallmark of local agribusiness — farmers’ markets. The Ecology Center has been operating Berkeley farmers’ markets since 1987, and local vendors from all over Northern California have found loyal customers at the three markets: South Berkeley on Tuesdays, North Berkeley on Thursdays, and Downtown Berkeley on Saturdays. I investigated a typical Tuesday market evening on Adeline and 63rd, where a crowd of all ages — all masked and distanced — seemed to relish in the opportunity to get out of the house and socialize safely while browsing the local vendors. Speaking to one of the Ecology Center volunteers, we joked about the recreational factor of the market: “Cal students like coming here with their friends. They put on, like, sundresses,” he quipped. “It’s definitely a social thing in addition to being an essential service.”

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has designated farmers' markets an essential business for the duration of the pandemic, primarily because of their role in providing a relatively low-risk shopping environment. As grocery stores face long lines, item shortages, and social distancing difficulties, many flock to outdoor markets for a less stressful experience. The Tuesday market has vendors representing all varieties of food industries: produce, meat, fish, baked goods, and even those focused on holistic well-being, selling goods like essential oils or herbal medicines. The pandemic has affected these industries and vendors differently, but one thing remains constant: they will keep coming to the farmers’ market.

I spoke to Sam, a vendor with The Little Fish Company, about the pandemic’s effect on fisheries. He’s been working with the company for  less than a year as a deliveryman and market coordinator. While the fish are caught from Half Moon and Bodega Bays, the company is centered in Grass Valley, up in Nevada County. Sam travels around two hours each way to come to the Berkeley Tuesday market, but he’s gotten used to the long distance travel associated with the job. The Little Fish Company offers the option for customers to order online with pick up locations spread out across Northern California: Auburn, Truckee, Reno, Sacramento, Placerville, and Berkeley. In addition to pre-ordered pickups, they offer home deliveries, with most of their customers in the area closer to their Grass Valley headquarters. “In Sacramento and in the other markets, we do deliveries,” Sam explains. “We added it during the pandemic — it’s a little bit more of a cost, but there are some customers we have who are definitely more at risk and stopped coming to markets, and they’ve been buying from us for years.” 

Adding delivery service seems to be the biggest change for The Little Fish, but larger fishing operations have not  fared quite as well. According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations about the effect of the pandemic on the fishing industry, aquaculture may be affected more so than small scale fisheries. One example is the difficulties associated with feeding farmed fish, seeing as many are reliant upon outside inputs like seed or feed that extend their supply chain beyond just the ocean. In addition, large-scale aquaculture operations often require crew to operate on sea for extended periods of time, making a potential disease outbreak difficult to control and isolate. While the farmed fish industry has faced increased troubles, The Little Fish Company sells only wild-caught fish, which significantly reduces how they have been impacted by the pandemic. “The owner does the fishing, and they’ve kept everyone employed, haven’t had any layoffs,” Sam says. He then went on to discuss the various problems he sees in the fishing industry and our food systems as a whole, naming primarily crab overfishing, the politics of bigger corporations, and challenges with corporate interests. When it comes to his business at the farmers’ market, though, he has not noticed any major changes: “It’s definitely been slower on some days, but then some days are better than others. Could be the coronavirus, or could just be the nature of the market.”

At the opposite end of the closed-off block, where the Tuesday market sprawls, sits the table for Stepladder Creamery, a meat and dairy operation where I met Brooke, their Bay Area operations manager. Their 45-acre ranch is located in Cambria, about four hours south of Berkeley in between Big Sur and San Luis Obispo, but Brooke operates out of a small hub in San Leandro where the products are centralized. In addition to cheeses and meats, they offer avocados, passionfruit, citrus fruits, and honey. It’s a family operation, and additional revenue comes from the various tours and events they offer in Cambria (they even have a page where you can get to know their goats by name). While creamery tours have been cancelled since March, Stepladder has seen an incredible sales increase from an unlikely source: their meat. Their beef in particular has proven to be a booming business in the pandemic. Brooke explains, “We have a little tiny herd for us on a hillside — we didn’t even take beef out until the pandemic hit, but there was such an increase in meat demand that I thought we could bring it out here. We started out doing beef about 4-5 years ago, but we were losing money on it, it wasn’t selling very well. I decided to bring back the program once I saw a little bit more meat demand. Meat increase of sales here has been outrageous.” She illustrated this point with a somewhat shocking statistic: “This Tuesday market used to be our least grossing market, now it’s our highest.” 

When the pandemic hit, Stepladder opened an online ordering system on their website, which Brooke says has “definitely helped with” the sales increase. Similar to The Little Fish Company, having an online presence gives people the opportunity to stay home and still get their essentials from local, small-scale producers. However, a lot of the increase in meat sales Brooke attributes to the COVID outbreaks in meat processing plants across the country, causing limited meat supply in grocery stores across the country beginning around April. As meat processing facilities faced increasing numbers of positive cases, President Trump ordered them to stay open because of supply concerns, citing that as much as 80% of U.S. meat production capacity could shut down. Tyson Foods Chairman, John Tyson, even admitted that the U.S. food supply chain “is breaking.” The temporary collapse of the meat industry demonstrated just how precarious food systems reliant on industrialized animal agriculture are. When asked about the general problems she sees in our current food systems, Brooke was quick to respond: “Meat’s just a mess, when it’s so mass-produced in general — especially pigs. Pigs can be such a beautiful thing, they made us a no waste program. They’re eating all the avocados and citrus fruit that hits the ground.” She’s referring to their avocado-fed pork, where pigs eat the damaged produce that doesn’t make it to market. This emphasis on no waste adds to the farm’s minimal environmental footprint. The entire farm is powered on solar panels, and they don’t pump any water, choosing instead to build their own reservoirs and capture rainwater — the most expensive investment, Brooke tells me, but worth it. “Any time you mass produce anything, especially meat, it’s going to have really bad effects on the environment. We do everything at a small scale, trying to reverse that.”

Farmers’ markets have not only been essential to vendors trying to stay afloat during the pandemic, but they have also played an instrumental role in helping food insecure customers have access to safe, healthy food. MC, a farmers’ market manager with the Ecology Center, says they have seen an increase in market presence at two of the three Berkeley markets since the pandemic began. “In general, I think it’s a good option to come here,” MC explains. “Elderly customers feel safe because we’re outside, we reinforce masks at all times, we’re able to do line spacing much easier than an indoor space — it just feels like we have more room to work with and we’re still following safety guidelines.” They also offer an Accessibility Fast Pass, available at info booths, to allow customers who may have trouble standing for long periods of time to move to the front of the line.

In addition to following basic safety protocols, the Ecology Center has pioneered several programs designed to relieve food insecurity, primarily through the use of their Market Match program. Designed by the Center in 2019 and now operating at more than 260 farmers’ markets across the state, Market Match encourages healthy eating and accessible, local produce for low-income customers. The program enables CalFresh recipients to use their benefits with vendors at farmers’ markets. Customers can choose what amount of CalFresh benefits they want to be withdrawn from their card, and they are instead redeemed for tokens or vouchers that can be used on any CalFresh-eligible item at the market. In addition to the CalFresh benefits, the market will then provide Market Match specific tokens or vouchers that match the amount of CalFresh tokens exchanged, essentially doubling the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables users can buy. “People have lost their jobs and a lot of people are on food stamps right now. The Market Match program pretty much doubles your money that you take out of your account,” MC tells me. CalFresh users can access the Farmers' Market Finder map to locate markets that accept CalFresh EBT cards. 

A more recent program that was developed after the pandemic began is the Ecology Center’s Farm Box program. They offer online orders for contactless, curbside pickup at the Saturday market in downtown Berkeley. The farm boxes are packaged by participants in the Ecology Center’s Youth Environmental Academy, a new internship program designed for young people ages 15-24 who want to learn about and gain experience in environmental justice. Priced at $30 a box, the boxes’ contents rotate according to what is in season: a typical winter box could include squash, garlic, onions, cauliflower, kale, fuji apples, and mandarin oranges. Each box is sourced from local vendors who usually participate in the Ecology Center’s weekly markets. The Farm Boxes, because of the Market Match program, can also be paid for using CalFresh, helping at-risk, low-income consumers find crowd-free, safe access to nutritious food. 

Amidst the myriad of problems facing industrialized agriculture, farmers’ markets provide a kind of in-person reciprocity between vendor and buyer, each helping the other survive during the pandemic. As MC puts it, “Throughout it all, we’ve run the markets. We’ve never stopped.”