Whiteness in Markets

     This article touches on the idea that white skinned people dominate the alternative agriculture movement and unknowingly create a whiteness bubble within it. I personally have witnessed this with each and every time I've gone to a farmers market. It is not hard to tell that most of the time, its dominated by white people. The author's specifically focus on discovering the proportions of races in the two markets studied, and what the people within them think about the farmers markets role in their community politically and culturally. As we know, they found both markets to be nearly a whiteout. The author's do mention that the markets exist in places that are already mostly white in terms of the population, so some of this is to be expected, however, the turnouts of non-white races present in the markets reflected an extremely low percentage of non-whites in the markets comparative to the total non-white populations. The author's claim this is largely due to the extremely high percentage of whites in the farmers market at any given time, price premiums in organic markets, and the idea that the white customers are reinforcing an imaginary where the food presented in their farmers market was grown by white families. 

    As usual, this is a tough problem to try and fix. One thing I noticed is the author's did not try to pinpoint a cause to the low percentage of non-white shoppers in the farmers markets. They mention multiple possible causes, but not one thing. They are not saying that the low percentage of non-whites compared to whites is solely due to the fact that mostly whites shop at farmers markets. That is because this article is meant to bring awareness to a lesser-realized cause of an already known issue. There is no one main cause. High prices, high whiteness, farmers markets typically being in higher income areas, lack of education on food sources, lack of foreign culturally significant foods and events , and much more are all causes of this. The high percentage of whites is just one important cause.

    A final note to end on is a potential solution to the issues presented from this reading specifically. I wouldn't know the actual effectiveness of this, but a connection I noticed at the Reading Terminal Market compared to any farmers market is that it is very diverse in both workers and customers. While I don't know if this is why, I have a feeling that the reason many more people feel welcome at the Reading Terminal Market is because it hosts an incredibly diverse array of stands. You can get fresh raw food that is significant in many different cultures, or cooked meals from other parts of the world that are cooked by people from other parts of the world. They even host foods from other regions of the USA. Most farmers markets I have been to are pretty standard in what you can get, lots of it is standard Amish or PA Dutch foods around PA which while they do a great job, it isn't going to bring people in who aren't accustomed to it in some way. While I know the Reading Terminal Market is not a farmers market, it is still a community hub centered around food just like a farmers market, so I think ideas between the two can be exchanged.