This area is fortunate to have a number of local farmers, artisans, and farmers markets. Lets have a conversation with one farmers market vendor a week and get to know them, learn about their lives, their struggles, and why they're market vendors.
Our goal here is to help folks see that there ought to be a place in their lives for the farmers market. It’s not that people should buy all of their food from the market, of course, but to recognize there is merit in knowing that you shook the hand of the farmers who grew the tomatoes in your salad, that you had a good conversation with the person you bought eggs from, and all the ingredients in the bread and pastries are familiar and easy to pronounce.
Meet Kate Hinderer of Abundant Life Kitchen – a gluten-free, vegan-prepared meals business. She is a single parent of four boys. Up until this year, her youngest son, Reign, would be at farmers markets with her. She started the business during COVID, when she needed to find a way to support her family after moving here from Oregon.
Farmers markets she participates in are in Lexington, Harrisonburg and Staunton. She’s been doing this six years and 100 percent of her livelihood comes from market sales.
Did you always know you wanted to do this? What made it happen?
So 2019, my kids and I had gotten out of, let’s just say, a bad marriage and my kids’ dad had left. I was single-parenting three kids when I moved to Virginia, to be close to my best friend because I needed the support. We came here with absolutely nothing. I had my truck, I put the kids’ bikes in the back of the truck, and each of us had a duffel bag full of clothes, and that was everything we had. We moved here to be near my best friend and stayed with her for the end of 2019, into 2020, and worked for her as well. So then, in 2020, COVID strikes, right? So, March 2020 lockdown happens and the kids lost school and I lost my job. We’d only been here for a few months and we’re trying to work on building a life out of, you know, nothing, and COVID knocks out everything basically.
It wasn’t necessarily one event; it was just more like a growing sense that the year 2020 was going to be a year of abundance for me and for my family. I was like, ‘I don't understand why it’s on my mind because we literally have nothing.’ So why in the world is this on my mind? I was watching the world fall apart, and I thought, 'you know what? Not only are we not going to panic, we're going to hang on to this word of abundance.' Also, we've been given the gift of time. We have all the time in the world, what are we going to do with it? And so I started pursuing the things in life that I was excited about. One was food. I just started cooking a lot. I was just having fun with it and then I had leftovers that me and my kids couldn't eat. So I started sharing it around with my neighbors and with my friends. People kept saying to me repeatedly, ‘You should sell your food. Are you going to start a business with your food? Why don't you start a business with your food?’ At that point, I was like, ‘okay, I guess that's something I'm going to try.’ I named it Abundant Life because that was the word I had gotten, and that was my way of holding on to that word, by putting it right into the business. I will never forget it.
Can you tell me some of the process of your job – what you make/grow and what your market tasks entail?
So, I've got farmers markets on Wednesdays, just one on Wednesdays, and then two on Saturdays. It's a full-week process. I order all of my ingredients over the weekend or sometimes into Monday. There's food prep Tuesday, ready for Wednesday's market, then food prep Thursday/Friday to get ready for Saturday's market. I mean it's kind of a 24/7 thing; there's not really an off day. Then [I] set up every Wednesday and early every Saturday. I send a person to one market or the other on Saturdays, I take one and then a different person will take the other one depending on what everybody wants to do. I would like to do three next year on Saturdays. The only reason I haven't done that before is just for lack of people who want to work on a Saturday, you know? But I'm finding people, though.
What are some of the struggles you face with a year-round outdoor market?
Well, mainly having people who want to set up a booth outside when it's zero degrees. The weather, the temperature in the summer can become a problem with fresh food. It's having to make sure that the coolers stay real cold and then I guess logistically just moving food can be a hazard, you know, like hazardous to your car and hazardous to your clothing. So moving the food from place to place, keeping the labels looking nice, keeping the packaging looking nice, this stuff gets damaged just in transit and we try not to but it happens anyway. Then the heat in the summer, I lose a decent amount obviously in the summertime because once it's been out, you can't sell it after that. So I try and eat as much as I can and then after a while I'm like, ‘okay I'm full, I can't eat no more’ and it goes back in the compost pile.
What are the rewards?
Being a single parent, I'm available for whatever my kids need. I feel like it's another blessing, that I get to spend every day with my child versus having to send him somewhere else, you know, to somebody else to parent him. And that's true with all my kids, really. They're at school but every single appointment, I'm there. Every single game, they have or practice or whatever, whatever they need, I'm able to be there for them. I'm in charge of making our schedule and stuff, so it gives me the ability to play all the roles and be a part of everything that's going on in their lives instead of being distant, separate. I have that flexibility and if I worked for someone else, I wouldn't get to have that.
What do you wish people knew about going to the farmers market?
There is so much more behind the scenes than people think. It's not a matter of, ‘oh, we went out in our backyard and we picked vegetables for five minutes and then we popped up our tents.’ No, it's like your whole entire life goes into preparing, to bring this. The local produce, the local artisans – [it’s] your community – that is up every week and it's not easy. Whatever people can be offer[ing] you [here] has everything to do with the rain versus the heat versus the humidity versus whatever's going on in the ground versus the bugs. There's just so much there and it's not smooth, it's not easy and there's so much more work [going] into it than people think.
I know people talk a lot about, or they complain a lot about, the prices of the farmer's market. The fact is, people want local, handmade products, they want things to be organic and non-sprayed and ethically sourced and all these things; they want all of that but they think that should be cheap to find and that's just not the way that it works. The price is not for the item. The price is for all of the hard work and planning that went into bringing the thing that people are really asking for. So yeah, I wish people would be more aware. We're not just trying to upcharge because we can. There's just so much more moving pieces and more aspects that are impacting what choices we make as business owners. I wish people understood what goes into making a farmers market happen.
