Fair Food stand earns a bigger place in the market

Six years ago, a meager card table of a local-food stand opened near the heart of the venerable Reading Terminal Market, hoisting the flag of non-factory-farmed lettuce and humanely raised beef - raising the eyebrows, in the process, of wary purveyors nearby.

Was this whippersnapper implying that they were in bed with Food Inc.? That they were waterboarding pigs for their pork sandwiches?

Well, that wasn't quite what she meant, said Ann Karlen, who'd opened the Fair Food Farmstand, explaining she was pointing fingers beyond the market's walls, not at the working stiffs over in the next aisle.

A truce ensued, and the farmstand expanded and flourished, adding frozen grass-fed sliders to its roster and farm-fresh eggs with yolks that stood up like the rising sun; elongated, white-tipped French radishes (from Pennsylvania Dutch country) and for this short stretch of fall an odd and intriguing, banana-mango of a fruit called the pawpaw, still found along the sheltered riverbanks of the Susquehanna.

Last year its local, small-farm produce sales shot up 30 percent. And tomorrow morning (at 10:30, with Marion Nestle, the nutrition crusader, set to speak) comes what you might call final validation: The stand is dedicating a sunny, new space along the 12th Street side of the market, more than doubling its 340-square-foot footprint, and its refrigerated and meat-freezer footage to boot.

With its heaping baskets and woodwork painted with old-school milk paint (made from salvaged week-old, local milk), with its centerpiece of fall flowers and border of buff-colored pumpkins, it now has the feel of a strapping farm lad, not the spawn of an upstart card table.

There's a touch of metaphor, too, in the fact that it has moved from the market's interior to higher profile frontage (in the space of the departed Rick's Steaks stand).

Things have changed in the last six years. Instead of feeling like a renegade in the bosom of the circa-1892 market, Fair Food is being marketed as one of its most-prized ornaments - the symbol of a return to its roots when most everything here was from nearby farms, fresh-picked, fresh-killed or fresh-churned.