This Week at the South Durham Farmers' Market

Viva la Salsa!
Get ready for a spicy day at the market this Saturday! We will be making use of our plentiful summer harvest by preparing both a traditional and a peach salsa for sampling from 8:30am to 10am. The salsa-making demonstration will be followed by the dynamic Corraei Moore at 10am, who will be teaching a beginner level salsa lesson. Stick around after the salsa lesson to practice your new moves and shop the market!
 
Which Came First: the Dip or the Dance? 
 Salsa music and dance are named for the extra fresh salsa dip, which has been delighting taste buds in all its forms for over four hundred years. Salsa, Spanish for sauce, has gone from an Aztec mixture of tomatoes, peppers and squash seeds to the condiment with the highest sales in America—surpassing even ketchup. There are almost no rules when it comes to making salsa. It can be coarsely chopped or blended, hot or cold, fresh or cooked. The majority of us are most familiar with salsa cruda or salsa fresca, a combination of raw tomatoes, onions, peppers and cilantro, but there are dozens of salsa combinations.

The zesty sauce was certainly the inspiration for the music, and the music’s hot rhythms demanded dancing. Salsa music and dance is a continuously evolving amalgamation of influences, but Cuban Son music, African rhythms, Puerto Rican lyrics, and American jazz were particularly important. The dance itself borrows heavily from mambo, flamenco and tango. While there is no consensus as to when ‘salsa’ was first used to describe the music or the dance, by the 1920s, there was a new Latin dance craze. It then exploded in the mid-twentieth century with the influx of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants to the United States.

 Celebrate National Farmers' Market Week
National Farmers’ Market Week starts this Sunday, August 4th!  The South Durham Farmers’ Market was one of seven hundred farmers’ markets to open in 2012, and there are now over 7,800 markets in the U.S.

You are receiving this newsletter, so you are likely already a supporter of farmers’ markets and the services they provide to the community, but we would like to provide you with a few talking points courtesy of the Farmers’ Market Coalition, so you can tell your friends why they should shop local, too.

• Growers selling locally generate 10 more jobs per $1 million in revenues than non-local sellers.
• Markets encourage new and young farmers by providing a low cost venue to sell their products.
• For every $100 spent at a farmers market, $62 stays in the local economy, and $99 stays in state.

For more information, go to the Farmers' Market Coalition