FAT City: Now you have no excuse not to buy from farmers markets.

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I spent my first 18 years of life in the Central Valley (Del Rey, specifically — I might as well name it, Del Rey doesn’t get many shout outs). The next 18 I spent elsewhere, mostly in bigger cities; San Diego, San Francisco, New York, LA.

In those bigger cities, going to the farmers market was often something you did to feel cultured and cosmopolitan, walking around with your favorite tote bag and a dog to experience the street life, Europeanly. One did this, perhaps, for better produce (debatable), but rarely for cheaper. Oftentimes it felt like you were just getting supermarket produce and paying an upcharge for the atmosphere. A sort of yuppie tax, as I liked to think of it.

Living here in the epicenter of agriculture, it seems strange that we drive past endless rows of bountiful fruits, nuts, and vegetables just to buy our groceries from big supermarkets. An epicenter of agriculture, but alas, also of strip malls and sprawl.

It’s easy to get jaded by ag statistics when you grow up around here, but if you can unglaze your eyes, they’re pretty staggering: using less than 1% of the nation’s farmland, the Central Valley produces 40% of the entire country’s fruits, nuts, and “other table foods” (per the USGS). It’s easy to just call ourselves “the nation’s fruit basket” while glossing over the particulars, but in this case, the easy branding almost doesn’t do justice to the particulars.

Given that, it feels strange, borderline blasphemous, to buy that locally-grown produce from a middleman, in the same kind of places one would buy them in the badlands of Wyoming (probably the same produce too, in many cases). Certainly we have our reasons for doing this (being overworked, not having any spare leisure time to spend strolling farmers market stalls, etc), but mostly it comes down to convenience.

Does the convenience of supermarket produce shopping make it any less blasphemous? I don’t have an answer to that, but another thought did occur: what if we could make farmers market shopping slightly more convenient?

That was the genesis of this week’s Guide to Fresno and Clovis Farmers Markets.

Certainly some versions of this already existed, in partial form, on various websites (often with out-of-date information) but I’d never seen one with a map, with every area farmers market collated according to time and day, along with vendors lists — available entirely for free, with no paywall or ad interruptions. (All the more reason to support Fresnoland, your friendly neighborhood hyperlocal news non-profit, not that we’re begging).

We get it, you don’t always have time to stroll around a farmers market when you’re just trying pick up a few things for dinner in between errands. But maybe, just maybe, next time you need some produce, you could take a look at the guide, figure out what day and time it is, and whether there’s a farmers market going on (the odds aren’t bad!), and maybe go get some stuff from your local growers face to face for a change. We can’t pretend this will be easier, but it’s hard to deny that it’s nicer. A little easier, maybe?

Fresno has some of the best farmland in the world. Shouldn’t we have some of the best farmers markets?

Around here, going to a farmers market isn’t an affectation, it’s closer to a civic duty.

— Vince Mancini, Contributing Editor, Food

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