The Oxford English Dictionary defines “market” as “the meeting or congregating together of people for the purchase and sale of provisions or livestock, publicly exposed, at a fixed time and place.” The work “market,” which first appeared in a English manuscript in the 10th century, is more than a thousand years old. One author describes the concept of a market as atavistic. I recognize the word, but don’t really know its meaning so I return to the dictionary.
“Atavistic” describes an event that occurred in “a great-grandfather’s grandfather’s lifetime.” That is to say, the word conveys a sense of long, long ago. Referring to markets as atavistic implies that the concept of a market reaches far back into the early mists of human endeavors. Other customs may have faded, but the notion of market still exists.
If the practice of people gathering to buy, sell, and exchange dates back to the beginnings of human experience, then Farmers Markets are expressions of a deep human need that has existed in a similar form for at least a thousand years. Actually, longer than that. The word “market” became part of our written record in the 900s, but the custom no doubt descends even further back into the unwritten portion of our interactions as human beings.
So when a couple of hundred 21st-century New Englanders assemble at 9am Saturday morning on a patch of lawn adjacent to a children’s playground in Connecticut, we are not simply gathering to exchange local food and flowers for money. We are participating in an activity that is deeply rooted in human experience.
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