Market Day

In the months leading up to our move to Uruguay, I had bucolic fantasies dancing around my brain about raising chickens, having farm animals and being an organic gardener. I had even planned what the hen-house would look like. In my Green Acres silliness, I had already named the goats we would raise after previous co-workers (Ino for the stinkiest one and Kylie for the cutest). Clearly, all those issues of Mother Earth News I had read had taken root in my brain.




Fast forward to the present. It became clear that an isolated life in a rustic cabin in the campo does not suit us for more than a few months of the year. So we traded in our pitch fork and overalls for a modern house in a beach town with all the amenities. Don’t start thinking this is typical suburbia though. The road in front of our house, though level and well traveled, is not paved. The other day I was lured outside by the unmistakable clipity-clop of a horse-drawn carriage going down the road. It could have been followed by a speeding Mercedes. That’s how it is here – an interesting blend of old and new. Just a 15 minute walk to the water and we can buy fish caught that day. We also have an open air market (called a feria) just down the road that we walk to once a week to buy a huge variety of high quality inexpensive fresh local produce.

So, no chickens for us. We can buy lovely organic eggs with rich orange yolks at the weekly market for far less than we would spend on chicken feed. And we don’t have to clean up chicken shit. Even after devouring books like The Last American Man, and Carla Emory’s Encyclopedia of Country Living, and of course, Mother Earth News, I am no homesteader. And that is just fine. Because in Uruguay, you don’t have to grow it yourself and live off the grid to have wholesome, fresh, locally produced food as the norm. It is a small country and they don’t need to turn to factory farming to feed it. Also it bears mentioning that petroleum based fertilizers are expensive and natural farming traditions are preserved because they are simply cheaper. Farm animals pretty much live out their animal lives in a natural way before making their way to your dinner plate. No CAFOs, no so-called “free range” chickens that live their beakless lives without ever seeing the sun, no docking the tails of pigs so they don’t bite off each others’ tails in their horrible fetid confinement. I think author Michael Pollan would be pleased.

Today is market day. I am eating divinely sweet strawberries at the moment. We came home with our usual huge haul. We walked there and spent 297 pesos (about $13).
This bought us: ½ kilo of strawberries, 1 kilo of tomatoes, 2 kilos of onions, 2 eggplant, 1 large winter squash, 1 bunch of spinach, 2 kilos of oranges, 1 large head of broccoli, 1 kilo of lemons, a bunch of bananas (the one non-local concession, they are from Ecuador, it is too cold here for them), and ¼ kilo of black olives. In this country of non-apologetic carnivores where beef is practically a religion, one could be a vegetarian quite easily.