Noisy Balloonist Blog is the apprentice

It’s 7:30am and I’m chefspotting. Cal-Med czar Mark Peel of Campanile is scouting fennel. New-French fabulist Josiah Citrin, chef/owner of Mélisse, is writing today’s carte blanche menu in his mind, inspired by flowering broccoli, crenellated morels the color of 70% dark chocolate and frais du bois. Alain Giraud, whose Anisette Brasserie cooks under the market food tent once a month, appears to be on a family outing as he shepherds children among the stalls. Brigades of prep cooks negotiate over crates of first-pick produce that the public will never touch unless they’re behind a restaurant fork. I theorize the existence of a parallel farmers market with items only chefs can see. Perhaps if I slip between those two vans and drop a coin in that parking meter flashing FAIL a doorway will open, and like Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley, I’ll access the food wizards’ secret midway.

At 8:30am Los Angeles’ mother-market opens to the rank and file, a five-block cruciform of fruit, vegetables, flowers and the occasional half-primal of grass-fed bison direct from the soil to your reusable bag. Citrus, dates and avocados arrive from San Diego County. Staples like onions, garlic, lettuce, tomatoes and sweet corn are trucked over the Grapevine from the Central Valley. Tehachapi’s Weiser Farms delivers potatoes, crinkly spinach and enough polychromatic carrots to fill a 64-count Crayola box. From the micro-climes of the Central Coast come berries and Coleman Farm’s eclectic greens like amaranth, nettle and lamb’s quarter.

I have oysters at two bucks a slurp from Carlsbad Aqua Farm. The Luna tastes like cucumber and melon, brine and snow. It’s so cold. Sensory mechanisms decouple, buffers overflow and a feral smile opens my face. It’s only 9am and I’m not prepared. When I manage a glance at the man next to me, his head is thrown back and his eyes are closed. There’s a spent oyster shell in his hand. No cup of coffee can do this.

By 10:30am the market is packed. Cars stack up five deep outside public lots that were full an hour ago. Shoppers browse for organic Fujis from Ha’s Apple Farm, Schaner’s coop-fresh eggs (in shades of speckled blue and rose!) and artichokes the size of medieval truncheons. For DIY brunch I collect a loaf of bread from sourdough evangelist Bezian Bakery, a wedge of raw-milk gouda from Winchester Cheese Company and a ripe tomato. At 11 the throngs are peaking so I shelter in place under the City of Santa Monica tent at the intersection of 2nd and Arizona. My Leatherman yields a crude but savory tomato-and-cheese sandwich. I make a mental note to bring mustard.

For most Southern Californians seasons exist only on the Weather Channel, but at the market our tilting planet wields supreme influence. Lovers of food grown in the ground in rhythm with nature anticipate joy, then sorrow, as items come and go. Winter brings hardy squash, blood oranges and Hachiya persimmons oozing honeyed syrup. Fava beans are huge in spring, heaped unprocessed atop vendors’ tables still in their woolen pods. Summer is for stone fruit and the heirloom tomato—too dense, variegated globes, their ravishing sweetness fixed by the sun and best appreciated with nothing more than olive oil and a drift of salt. Finally, after the first autumn storms strike the Western Sierra, mushroom people emerge with wild porcini, I presume in briefcases handcuffed to their wrists. Any bolete that smells like leaf matter after rain and tastes like peat crossed with dry-aged beef is bound to inspire a certain cock-eyed adulation, and passerby approach David West’s mushroom stand just to sniff in tribute.

At 1:30pm the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers Market, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2011, shuts down. The streets open to traffic and the urban drone returns. The chefs have been behind prep lines since mid-morning, while the foodies and hippies and retirees have melted back into the city. The farmers crave only sleep. I keep an ice chest in the trunk of my car. It’s great for camping, the rare bass fishing excursion out of Port Hueneme, and market Wednesdays. I drive home and process the day’s take.