Westside Is the Best Side...for Food Trucks and Markets and E-Waste

It's pretty simple--the Westside Farmers' Market needs you. The market is sort of caught, if you've never been, in all sorts of ways. The only one in an actual neighborhood--it's held on the grounds of the Harding University Partnership School at the corner of Valerio and Mountain--, it's attempting to attract customers from a very diverse neighborhood, and perhaps underlines the issues not talked about enough, namely that the current food revolution is a bit bourgeois. Still, everyone needs to get the message that organic local food from small suppliers is best for a whole host of reasons, from personal health to the planet's well-being. And keeping a market like the Westside one going is key to helping make that point. The past few weeks the market has had an added attraction no other market does--the school district's Mobile Cafe has been serving up meals on the cheap. You really need to come on down, enjoy a great grilled veggie salad (for $5) or a double burger (for $6) or some Mexican food specialty (those have varied from week to week). It makes the market a much livelier, friendlier place. Then go support the farmers, so they can tell other farmers the Harding Market is in its way back, and they need to start selling again (it was in one of those bad spirals, where fewer people shop, so fewer come to sell, so fewer come to shop, so...yikes). Be there from 4 - 7 pm (yep, the hours are longer now to accommodate people who just get back from the work day). There's a bonus, too, just today--free E-waste recycling! So bring some broke down electronics, and leave with a full stomach and grocery basket.

Hot Meals on Hot Wheels

If the produce at a Farmers’ Market doesn’t inspire you to cook, you either have vegetable-phobia or as many kids as the Duggars and have no time. But while that perfect late spring fava bean might suggest a lovely meal (amazing aside king salmon, say), it’s also a ton of work you might not be able to do — first a de-podding, then a boil, then a peel! — in a given night. So perhaps you want to buy produce one night for the next, and just get a quick meal pronto.

The Wednesday Farmers’ Market at Harding University Partnership School, 1625 Robbins Street, will now be the first of the markets to feature a food truck — and not just any, but one of the Santa Barbara School District’s Mobile Cafés that were the hit of Earth Day this year, and are obviously allowed onto school property. We’re talking organic food, often Mexican cuisine, made to keep schoolkids not just healthy, but happy, too (and you, parents, know how hard that is). So it’s going to be good in more ways than good usually knows how to be.

The Mobile Café will be at Harding from 5 to 7 p.m. tomorrow, Wednesday, June 29, while the market runs from 3:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Check it out so it keeps coming!