How to act local + global at your market fruit, vegetable, bakery, or seafood stand

Growing up, I lived in a corner of the end of the nineteenth century where mule drawn carts came into town from surrounding rural areas carrying every sort of seasonal product, - fresh veggies and fruits, seafood and fish, steaks, caned and wicker furniture.

Farmers and craftsmen prowled the streets using their deep voices - or, a bull horn if they had one. We kids would flock to the sides of their old truck and convince our parents that 'oh, we do love peas;' and so on, just to keep buying. Buying from these salespeople was always an adventure - you would aim for lagniappe (the little something for nothing that comes at the end of prolonged negotiation) there would be sampling, and the men would generally make your experience fun, telling stories and connecting you to where they had come from.

How do we build a world in which small farmers are brought back into cities, where markets are as small as we can make them, where overlaps in self interest just make sense? I know. I have seen this world emerging from the desest cities to the most hard to reach rural third world.

Buy local. Being local in an internationalized world. How to be rural and support rural initiatives from cities to country