Feeding the People

Some fragmented thoughts on a local farmer's work, the beauty in the seemingly ordinary, and a batch of janky spring rolls

Thursday, August 25
Grand Rapids, Mich.

Hey there, friendly reader.

Last Friday, I went to the Fulton Street Farmers Market, just three blocks from our house, to chat with John Crans. A farmer in the nearby town of Hudsonville, Crans has been bringing his produce to sell at the market for 41 years.

I first encountered Crans a few months after Tristan and I moved to Michigan in early 2020. Especially after the imposition of the COVID-19 lockdown, which began two months after we arrived, the farmers market became a mainstay for us. This year, the Fulton Street Farmers Market marks 100 years of continuous operation. In the winter, it’s open only on Saturdays, but during the growing season, venders show up three days a week.

Amidst the monotony of lockdown, the farmers market helped us mark the passage of time—the arrival of asparagus in late spring, then strawberries and rhubarb, then blueberries and summer greens, then peaches and tomatoes and peppers, then root vegetables and hardy greens. To observe what came and what went became one of our main sources of delight and entertainment. And we’ve never lost our sense of wonder at the prices; in Brooklyn, a dozen brown eggs would cost $6 or $7, for instance, whereas here, we could pay as a little as $3, and often, they’d be beautiful blue ones.

Some of the more popular stalls feature polished, hipster-magnetic branding—elegant typefaces, professionally printed stickers, produce bursting from elegant crates that could just as easily feature in a Magnolia photo shoot. Crans has a hand-painted wooden sign (“Barry Patch Farm,” it reads). He just cuts up pieces of cardboard box and scrawls his prices on them in Sharpie. He arranges his goods in little green produce cartons, stained from reuse week after week. Other farms have electronic scales; he hangs an old-fashioned analog one on the nearest post. You can pay most venders with a credit card; he takes only cash.

Where other farms have half a dozen folks working their stands, many of them young people seemingly from central casting, with hair tossed into messy yet stylish buns and farmer-chic overalls, Crans works alone. He is 79. When he has no customers, you can often glimpse his slightly stooped figure leaning over his table, pen in his hand as he works through a word game from the newspaper.

I rarely see more than one or two shoppers at his stall. This makes sense, given that some weeks, he seems to have little more to sell than a few pints of currants or a handful of squash. Really, what I love about his presence at the market was that it doesn’t seem to make much sense. Crans seems a holdover from another era, except for one other thing: his trucker hat. Battered and stained, it reads: Love Inc.. Crans has also added several buttons, including one that declares, “Black Lives Matter,” and another that says, “Welcome the Stranger: Matthew 25:35” (“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat...”)

Born in Canada, Crans came to Michigan to attend Calvin College. He and Anne, who also went to Calvin, met at church, married, and reared three kids together. In 1979, they bought a small farm in Hudsonville. Two years later, he began coming to the Fulton Street market “with summer squash and  zucchini,” he said. “That’s all.”

Slowly, Crans started to sell other things too: black raspberries, because a previous owner of the farm had planted some. Currants, gooseberries, and blackberries, which he added to his garden. He planted gladiolus because he saw some at the market “and I kind of liked them, so I said, ‘I’m going to try to grow them.’” Okra and kousa squash, because almost nobody else at the market sells them. Apple trees, too—“but because we don’t spray, I never really get enough to bring them to market.” 

Most days, he’s out in the garden for eight or nine hours. At the height of harvest, if he’s heading to market the next day, he might work from early in the morning until after 10 p.m., filling the back of his aging Ford Ranger pickup with boxes of produce. Even after he gets home from the market, he’ll head out, pick beans, clean up some berry canes, dig some potatoes. “The plants don’t stop. The weeds don’t stop,” he said. “I always have something to do.”

He has never done this mainly for the money. In those early years, he said, “if I made $20, that was good!” His pricing can be haphazard, but it always veers toward the absurdly generous. Where other stalls sell heirloom tomatoes for $4 or $5 a pound, his go for $2 or $2.50. When I asked why, he said simply, “Well, I want to sell them!”

I watched one elderly woman carefully pick out a single tomato, which Crans weighed. Before he could tell her that it was $2, she grabbed a zucchini from a carton ($5 a quart) and said, “I want this one.” “Well, let’s just say $2,” he said. Last year, when I asked if I could buy all the heirloom tomatoes he had left—I was canning sauce that weekend—he gave me 21 pounds for $30.

A chatty extrovert who peppers his banter with recipe suggestions and time-honored phrases like “Holy mackerel!”, Crans sees his primary work as connecting with people—“and feeding people.” Over time, he has gotten to know many customers—“some, I know their names, and others, it’s just their faces.” He gets deep satisfaction from feeding people: “I’m helping to make a small difference in how people eat.” He sees an educational element to his presence. A middle-school social studies teacher for nearly four decades, he is now retired from the classroom. Yet Crans still feels the urge to teach. “Food doesn’t just come from a store. It comes from a farm,” he said. “This is just a continuation of the way I’ve lived my life.”

He learns snippets of customers’ stories—what they like to eat and what they don’t. As we talked, a middle-aged woman wandered up and glanced at what was on the table. “How are your French beans looking?” she asked hopefully—her diplomatic way of asking why there were no beans for sale. She said that she’d cooked some for her son, and he had loved them.

“We should have some next week. They’re blossoming,” Crans replied. “Maybe we’ll get some rain tomorrow and that might help.”

“Give them a drink!” she said. “See you soon.”

Crans has watched customers grow their families, adding kids and then grandkids. One regular showed up holding a pacifier in his left hand and pushing a stroller. “My grandson,” he announced. He bought all of Crans’s okra. One other vender was offering okra that day, but they were too big. “I like to pickle them,” the man said. 

Coming to market quietly testifies to Crans’s care for his land, a part of his story and philosophy that, while woven inextricably into whatever he sells, often gets overlooked. Over the years, he has slowly enriched his soil. “My land abuts muck, so on one corner, it’s muck. Three-quarters is loam, some is clay. And what I’ve done is put bags and bags and bags and bags of leaves on the garden.” The fallen leaves gradually decompose, nourishing the soil. “I also add a little bit of lime to help break down the clay so that it’s not quite as heavy,” he said. “Whatever you have, you deal with it.”

At his peak, he was cultivating about an acre and a quarter; now he’s down to two-thirds of an acre, maybe three-quarters, depending on the year—enough not just for the farmers market but also for the honor-system roadside farmstand that he keeps stocked. “You have to plant the seed, cultivate, and harvest, but you also have to let the land rest,” he said. “Right now, about a third of the garden is lying fallow. I always let one part of the garden lie fallow, because soil needs a rest too.”

He’s attentive, too, to the other creatures inhabiting the land he tends. “The other day, I was coming up from the garden, and I thought I saw something: it was the flick of the tail of a deer,” he said. Even though his property is fenced, the deer will sometimes leap it to steal a snack. “I’ve wondered about the value of the fencing,” he said. “The deer can go over. Other animals go under. Rabbits might eat some of the beans. Woodchucks and groundhogs might take a few bites out of the squash. You live with it, because that’s life for them. If I’m picking berries and drop one, I think, I guess some other critter will just get to enjoy that one. They’re just trying to survive too.”

Speaking of survival, about that “Black Lives Matter” button: Not long ago, a shopper picked out quite a few vegetables. Before she could pay, her eyes glimpsed that button. She said: “You know what kind of organization Black Lives Matter is?”

“What kind?” Crans asked. Much as he did for so many years as a teacher, he often answers questions with questions.

“A Marxist organization,” she replied. “You believe in that?”  

She walked away without buying anything.

“Every organization, every movement, has good people and not-so-good people,” Crans told me. “To me, the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ is more than an organization. It means helping Black people secure their rights. It means helping people who have been downtrodden for a long, long time.” 

I asked him why he wears the buttons on his hat even as he knows that they could alienate some customers. He got them at an advocacy conference in Washington, D.C., some years ago. “I thought, Is this important? Yes. Some people might be happy to see them, some people might not be,” he said. “That’s okay. I believe in something, and I’m telling you this by wearing it. If you don’t like me and my stances, well, wahoo.” 

There’s something I admire deeply about Crans’s steady presence—the faithfulness it takes to show up in the fields day after day, to come to market week after week, to stay attuned to the rhythms of the land year after year. His story might seem ordinary to you, but there’s such beauty in this kind of ordinary, such tender goodness in this kind of witness.

Crans turns 80 next June. When I asked how much longer he plans to do this, he waved the question away: “A little while longer.” The last time he took an extended break was in 2000, when he and Anne went on a two-week tour of Europe. “My wife always wants me to stop. She says, ‘When are we going on vacation?’” he said. “While we were away, I had someone supposedly taking care of my garden. When I got back, it wasn’t great. They said, ‘It was kind of hard.’”

Even as Crans feeds others, this work feeds him: “I’ve always been a people person. I do this because I like doing it. I’m not here just for business. Here, you get to be a real person who cares. These are people we’re dealing with! And I hope customers feel they got what they wanted. Do they always? Probably not. But that’s life too.”

What I’m Cooking: When I was a kid, my mother would often make spring rolls for non-Chinese guests. They were always a crowd-pleaser—crisp, thin layers of pastry enfolding a savory mix of carrot, onion, and Napa cabbage. 

We had some folks over for dinner on Sunday, and I made spring rolls for the first time in years. I bought the same kind of wrappers my mom did (TYJ brand, available in the freezer section of most Chinese grocery stores—we’ve never made them ourselves, because we’re not total masochists). I shredded the carrot, onion, and cabbage (you could easily do this in a food processor, but mine’s broken), and then I chopped up some shiitake mushrooms, because I like their earthiness as well as the textural contrast. I sautéed them with some soy sauce, white pepper, sesame oil, and salt, and then I set the filling in a strainer to drain and cool. A while later, I began to wrap, sealing the edge with beaten egg.

As my spring rolls began to pile up, I remembered that my sister was always the one whose spring rolls came out pleasingly uniform and tidy, whereas my folds were haphazard and janky. Turns out, they still are! But deep-frying can cover a multitude of mistakes—and these tasted pretty good.

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In case you missed it: Last week, I opened up paid subscriptions to this newsletter. I’ve been overwhelmed by the words of encouragement and the subscriptions I’ve received from so many of you in the days since. As I mentioned before, my writing here will remain free to all comers. But if you wish to support me and my work as well as Fozzie’s treat habit in this way, the option is there—and I am truly grateful.

A question for you: Where are you finding beauty and goodness these days in the allegedly ordinary? I’d love to know.

That’s all for this week. I’m heading to Boston on uncle duty. As always, I’m so glad we can stumble through all this together, and I’ll try to write again soon.

With gratitude,
Jeff