Good Earth, Good Water
For the discriminating foodie, three shopping meccas by Ronald Holden
A fundamental truth underlies everything about food: unless you grow
it, raise it or catch it yourself, you need a marketplace in which to
find it. Even if you bake your own bread, you still need to buy flour;
if you raise tomatoes in the backyard or a pot of herbs on the
windowsill, you still need to buy salt and pepper.
One of the reasons Seattle has become such a great food community is
its abundance of raw materials: seafood, mushrooms, fruit, clean water.
Add to that the hardworking farmers, fishermen and foragers, and the
well-established networks for getting the ingredients of their goodness
into the hands of buyers. In short: we've become a city of great
marketplaces.
We'll look at traditional, small-scale farmers' markets in upcoming
issues. For a start, though, a stroll through three of Seattle's
biggest and most colorful.
-Pike Place Market-
About to celebrate its 100th anniversary, Seattle's iconic Pike
Place Market nearly didn't make it to the age of 70. Its warren of
stalls, shops and independent vendors didn't fit in with developers'
plans for the neighborhood, and it was slated for demolition.
In France, at roughly the same time, that very fate befell Les
Halles, the center-city market that Zola called "the belly of Paris."
But in Seattle, the market that the painter Mark Tobey called "the soul
of Seattle" survived, thanks to a campaign waged by the architect
Victor Steinbrueck. (His son, City Councilman Peter Steinbrueck, is
currently trying to make sure there's no rebuild of the Alaskan Way
Viaduct.) The Market was placed under the watchful eye of a municipal
Preservation and Development Authority, which sets policy for its
permanent vendors, allocates space to a long roster of day vendors, and
organizes social services for the several hundred people who live in
the market's low-income housing.
Sol Amon, from his crowded perch overlooking Pure Food Fish, surveys
a narrow but busy stall perhaps 200 steps from the Market's iconic Pig.
It's not the seafood vendor where they fling the fish for TV cameras
and gawking tourists, it's the one that's been in business for 45
years. Sol was named King of the Market a year ago, an honor that he
takes in stride. One of his employees, Richard Hoague, has been
Delicious City Editorial Director Ronald Holden at Pure Food Fish - Photos by J. Cody Lucido
At its heart, Pike Place remains a traditional farmers' market.
Along the so-called low stalls, farm families from Auburn and Enumclaw
sell home-grown vegetables. Many are Hmong refugees from the mountains
of Cambodia. They also provide flowers and ornamental plants.
Intermingled with the farmers are the artists, artisans and crafts
people, offering tastes of honey and nuts, hawking T-shirts,
hand-painted ceramics, scrimshaw, leather, jewelry, hand-printed
postcards. Below street level are dozens of shops selling vintage
posters, vintage clothing, vintage books. All this, of course, without
a single Safeway or McDonald's. So, a naïve visitor might wonder, how
does the Market tolerate a Starbucks? Ah, but this is where Starbucks
was conceived, born and nurtured! This is ground zero, this warm petri
dish of supportive small businesses.
One cannot imagine Seattle today without the Pike Place Market at
its core. Let the Space Needle serve as Seattle's symbol; the Market is
its living, beating heart.
Seattle-based food, wine and travel writer Ronald Holden is
DeliciousCity's editorial director. His Tasting Notes and Culinary
Dispatches at cornichon.org was named one of the Internet's "Top Ten
Food Blogs" last year by About.com.