Market Lessons
Alec Devaprasad connects to food, history and neighbors at the Thursday farmers market in Mid-City.
By Alec Devaprasad
Back in November, I rode my bike over to the Thursday evening Crescent City Farmers Market in Mid-City. The market sits right at the corner of the Lafitte Greenway and Bayou St. John, which is a convenient five-minute ride from my house. It was a mild day in New Orleans with clear skies; ideal weather for shopping at a farmers market. I wandered around the market and its two dozen or so vendors and thought about what produce I might want for my weekend cooking. A small jazz band played on a raised wooden stage at the center of the market.
As I walked around I noticed an unfamiliar brown fruit at one of the stands. I approached the woman working the stand to ask a few questions. She smiled and greeted me from behind lush stacks of greens, turnips and satsumas. I was fixated on the brown fruit. I asked what they were. The woman told me they were pecans that still had their shells on. She explained how the nuts fell from a large pecan tree on their farm in southern Mississippi. This was the first batch they had been able to bring to market this season, she added.
I felt a little embarrassed. I’ve eaten pecans my whole life, but had no idea what the nut looked like in its harvested form. I had thought they were kiwis or a similar fruit. It was strange to realize how removed I was from a food that seemed so familiar.
I felt obligated to buy some pecans for an evening snack. The woman at the stand showed me her technique for cracking two pecan nutshells at a time. I left the market that day with a bag of fresh pecans as well as a deeper appreciation for the food we eat. There are people and stories behind our food, and we are healthier people when we can understand and tap into those stories. (Check out the map below to see farmers markets, community gardens and other food access points in your New Orleans neighborhood.)
I felt compelled to do some research on pecans after my farmers market visit. I learned the tree nut is native to North America. Wild pecans were a staple food source for Indigenous peoples in the Mississippi River Delta, and colonial farmers tried to domesticate the pecan tree with little success. It was a talented Black gardener named Antoine who paved the way for commercial production of pecans. Antoine was an enslaved man at Oak Alley plantation in Vacherie, La., in the mid-1800s. There is no record of his last name. His experiments using a grafting technique to propagate uniform saplings paved the way for pecans to be grown at scale, though he died before seeing his innovation spread, according to local researcher Katy Morlas Shannon, who wrote a book about Antoine’s life and last year talked to USA Today’s The American South about her findings. His legacy lives on in pralines and pies and dozens of New Orleans staples.
I enjoyed the pecans I bought on my Mid-City porch while chatting with neighbors. I learned the woman who sold them to me lives nearby. I saw her walking her dog down my street shortly after we met at the farmer’s market. She yelled out a friendly “What’s up, man?” and waved. I waved back in wonder at the new connection.
Alec Devaprasad is a Fall 2021 Community Reporting Fellow with Lede New Orleans. Devaprasad, a Tulane University grad, is a community organizer at VAYLA and a storyteller based in New Orleans.
This essay is available to republish under a Creative Commons license. Read Lede New Orleans’ publishing guidelines here.
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