This morning I biked down the Lake Shore Path to the Green City Market. Since it's Wednesday, it would be pretty empty, I thought. Wrong. Daley's pet farmers market was just about the most crowded I'd ever seen. There were people everywhere, from a battalion of moms with expensive-looking strollers to a slightly smaller yet sizable army of stylish young men (stylish in a meticulously-created-five-o'clock-shadow-and-carefully-rolled-up-bottoms-of-torn-jeans kind of way). I chained up my bike and walked in, wondering what the deal was. It turned out that Rick Bayless, the stellar chef of Topolobampo and Frontera Grill was doing a kitchen demonstration. One of the vendors at the nearby crepe stand told me that she'd never seen a chef demonstration this popular. (By the way, their cheese & herb crepe was pretty good, though the crepe itself could have been a bit less sweet.)

From a bunch of different stalls, I picked up überfresh asparagus (photographed), two heirloom tomatoes (photographed), about 1/4 pound of shiitake mushrooms and a pint of tiny strawberries. I got some stares when I was biking back home with the bag of strawberries hanging from the handle of my backpack, but that was definitely worth it--most of the fragile fruits survived the bumpy ride along Clark, on my suspension-less road bike. When Patrick comes home, I'll have them with some brownies and the leftover whipped cream (out of a spray can). Though I've snacked on some already...

Apparently, eating local is the "in" thing right now in the food writing industry (Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetables, Miracles and Alisa Smith's Plenty immediately come to my mind.) But looking at the veggies and fruits on the farmers' tables this morning in Lincoln Park, I couldn't help noticing the limiting implication of this "locavore" movement. Especially in Chicago.

There were lots of baby greens, asparagus and strawberries. There were quite a few young onions (photographed), chives, snap peas and rhubarbs. But there weren't too many others. Even the things we might think of as perennial staples at supermarkets, like potatoes and carrots, aren't visible in the farmers' market. Not that they should have been--I'm all for seasonality in veggies and fruits. But if I decided to stick to the complete locavore diet, I would be eating baby green salads and grilled asparagus for about a month before other things come in season. (I remember the cucumber hell and eggplant hell when my mom had bountiful years in our backyard veggie garden in Japan.) And what would I eat in winter, anyway?

Frigid Chicago winter aside, I suppose it really comes down to principles. I've been accustomed to being able to eat with a ton of variety, all year round, thanks to the globalized food production and distribution system. This is not just about the cooking methods and cuisines, but also about the ingredients. There's a limit to how many ways you can cook your asparagus. (For me, it's like five or six.) My brain might question the whole system that enables this kind of varied diet, but my spoiled (trained?) palate craves for the very thing that my brain questions. It's a glutton's dilemma that seems to take a lot of determination to solve.

Meanwhile, I'm entertaining the idea of reading either of the locavore books, because, after all, eating what can be produced locally may not be that limiting. Or is this an optimistic illusion?

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Green City Market
At the south end of Lincoln Park, between 1750 N. Clark St. and Stockton Dr.