Recently I wrote about what I call “food gentrification,” the displacement by grocers of staples for “foodie” treats, and its adverse impact on prices. My comments centered on a New York Times story lauding the “comeback” of bakeries offering niche (and premium-priced) novelties, one baker touting the fact that he uses fresh apples and dough to make his pastries. As I noted, once upon a time every baker thought that his job and nothing special. My food focus was inspired by last Sunday’s First Reading from the prophet Amos, who excoriated the wealthy of eighth century BC Israel for price gouging, adulterated weights and measures, and inflated currencies. In other words, plus ça change…

Now I’ll add observations about another phenomenon that has suffered food gentrification: farmers’ markets.

Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I remember the farmers market in my hometown. It was a bunch of green stalls near the main street in town, not far from the railroad tracks. It was a bit raucous, with lots of Perth Amboy’s housewives out on a Saturday morning shopping for a good bargain amidst the cluck of chickens and the quack of ducks. I remember my mother taking me after morning Mass, where we got a bag of Jersey sweet corn, some fresh potatoes, and green beans (two out of three ain’t bad). The decisive moment was stopping by the farmer with chickens: You picked your bird and the clucking hen was tried, executed, and bagged within about five minutes.

People went to the farmers’ market in those days for two reasons. One, the food was fresh. The chicken was alive two hours before she was in the oven; the potatoes were in the ground a day or two before being on the table. Two, the prices were cheap.

Fast forward to 2025. The “Little City” where I live — Falls Church, Virginia — has a Saturday farmers market. They promote it as one of the attractions of this rather liberal enclave populated primarily by those who livelihoods are somehow attached to the federal government. There are no clucking chickens. There are vegetables, most labeled “organic” and priced accordingly. Tell me: Are there “inorganic” potatoes? (Yes, I know “organic” means without tons of artificial chemicals.) It’s now a premium to eat potatoes grown the old-fashioned way. If it’s not “organic,” the other magic farmers market talisman is “artisanal.” There are folks pushing “artisanal” cheeses that I sometimes think if I bought three pounds of, I could probably use as a mortgage down payment.

Yeah, the farmer from Jamesburg who sold his cheese at my boyhood farmers market was “artisanal,” if you follow Merriam-Webster’s definition: “creating a product in limited quantities by traditional methods.” He had only so many cows and so much milk. He made cheese the way generations made cheese, i.e., by “traditional methods.” But he didn’t hawk his product (or price it) as anything except… cheese. He was a normal Jersey farmer who did what normal Jersey farmers did 50 years ago.

If I don’t buy high-priced “artisanal” cheese or “organic” vegetables in Falls Church, what’s left? Well, I can buy homemade soaps or some decorations. In other words, stuff I could honestly do without.

Today’s farmers’ market is not a place to get essential foods cheap. It’s an elite fantasyland, often populated by gentlelady “farmers” hawking “artisanal” goods that may tickle one’s exotic fancy but, as noted, one could honestly do without. The new farmers’ market will tell me I can maybe buy things cheaper at the chain grocery store (not necessarily true) but it won’t be as “fresh” or “lovingly made.”

Think about that. Has our mindset become so inverted by market priorities that “fresh” food is now a premium or that the apple pie was “lovingly made?” I’ll pass on certifying the affection packed into the crust because, back in Perth Amboy, the real farmer’s wife who sold some of her pies would have gotten laughs if she peddled her pies as “lovingly made.”

As I previously noted, St. Thomas Aquinas included as part of gluttony eating “expensively,” i.e., the kind of behavior that spends more than necessary to flaunt an appearance, image, or label. What I think Aquinas did not consider was the follow-on effects of such gluttony on a mass scale. He didn’t because most medieval people were often threatened by starvation, not over-satiety. But in our society, the social consequences of food gentrification in a food distribution system where the market tolerates the overall growth in overall prices to accommodate those eating “expensively” constitute a social justice problem no less than Amos’s wheat cheaters.

Yes, I think there is a moral dimension to this question and that’s the focus of my three commentaries about it. But it’s also a political question. It’s one reason why, whether you believe it or not, the price of eggs was an issue in the last presidential election. It’s arguably a reason why our politics have become so volatile: the “silent majority” (to borrow an even older political term) has become tired of trying to make ends meet in an economy that now seems to think that things people rightly thought of as normal expectations — healthy food, a roof over one’s head, a chance to help their kids have it better than you did, a measure of security in old age — are increasingly out-of-reach for ever more folks. Unless we develop a politics that takes seriously the middle class, not by entitlement but by respecting work, you can expect our political life to become even more roiled.

Our Lord, after all, thought it self-evident that a father give his son a fish instead of a stone and an egg instead of a scorpion (Mt 7:9-11). We need to ask whether, in our world, the stone has become the affordable option and the “loving father” concerned about “the planet” hands his boy bugs instead of a burger.