The Chicago Tribune August 6, 2008 Good Eating section featured an article entitled Roadside Americana: The farm stand has a place in our hearts- and we’re happy to report, on MapQuest too by Emily Nunn:
And with the help of readers, who sent us their favorites by e-mail and post (see list), we headed straight to two contrasting but charming examples of what “farm stand” (and even “family farm”) can mean today.
Now, we have hope for an America that cares more about farming to feed its people than farming to feed its cars.At the suggestion of Mary Ann Schwarzbach of Geneva, we drove 35 miles from the heart of Chicago past the modern menagerie of big brand-name stores, through affluent lanes of Lincolnshire to a different land altogether, to Prairie View, where we paid a surprise visit to Mary Sue Didier and her son, John, at Didier Farms.
They are part of a family that has hung on through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the land squeeze of suburban sprawl and the precipitous rise of global agribusiness giants like Cargill (whose profits from commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were 86 percent higher than the same period in 2007). Which is something special, because since the 1940s, the number of farms has dropped to 2 million from 6 million Read More…
