How Food Builds Fort Worth Community

I took a weekend visit to the Clearfork Farmers Market in Tarrant County. I wanted to speak to the vendors, attend the weekly event, and get a sense of how local products and people can foster a close and healthy community. After interviewing several vendors, I learned that food comes with stories, much like the people buying and selling it...

A dark sky looms overhead, but the threat of rainy weather is in direct opposition to the mood of those below the cloudy ceiling. It smells like grass and dog and river and bread. People are milling about the area for a multitude of reasons.

Facing the backdrop of the Trinity River, there is a line of mothers, fathers, and babies in strollers, the parents squatting and doing jumping jacks to get an outdoor workout in while also entertaining the children giggling in their seats. The instructor blows bubbles for the little ones and simultaneously spews encouragement at the parents.

To their right, a group of girls and older kids are splayed on colorful yoga mats. They wear matching workout sets and hold downward dog.

Actual dogs are everywhere. Golden retrievers run free. Smaller, more proper pooches are restrained by leashes, the fluffy Pomeranians yapping. A white Great Dane with cow-like black splotches struts above them, taller than the children and quieter, too. A German Shepherd lounges lazily at the feet of his owners as they sell locally grown mushrooms.

That’s the main reason people are gathered here, early in the morning, gloomy weather be damned: the products. Jams and pickles, juices and granola, bread and mushrooms, beef jerky and beignets, vegetables and eggs, pies and honey… Standing at the entrance of the Clearfork Farmers Market, twenty-three identical tan tents are lined up in a thick L formation, going straight then hooking left, bordering both sides of a gravel pathway, winding from the parking lot towards the Trinity River. To the right of the market sits The Press Cafe and a Bike Mart, and just beyond that, there’s a small field of baby brown and white cows nibbling on tall grass.

From eight to noon every Saturday morning (weather permitting), 4801 Edwards Ranch Road hosts the Clearfork Farmers Market. The market launched in April of 2016 and now proudly hosts over twenty-five local farmers, ranchers, and artisan vendors. The staff and vendors keep the market alive, working to maintain the comfortable, friendly community the event has built. Like the other approximately 8,690 farmers markets nationwide, the Clearfork Farmers Market is committed to providing fresh, high-quality, and locally grown products to the Fort Worth community.

Through food and other handmade items, farmers markets create connections that modern shopping, fast and modified foods, commercialization, and delivery modes have diminished. Farmers markets promote socialization and lasting relationships between producers and consumers. People have 15-20 social interactions per visit compared to 1-2 at a normal grocery store. Customers and vendors talk between and amongst themselves, establishing lively memories and reliable attachments.

Lines at most tents are long. The strong social aspect is evident in the lengthy conversations vendors are holding with their customers. The first vendor on the left, beginning the lineup, is selling meat, fresh greens, and fruit out of their tent and the truck behind it.

Trish and Jack Stone’s Saturday mornings start with the Texas sunshine, ripe and ready at six in the morning, loading up their orange-yellow truck for a busy few hours at the Clearfork Farmers Market. They have to be sure to stock just the right amount of product; too little and you sell out before the average 11:30 shopper rolls around, too much and you’ve over-harvested. By now, the couple has over three years of experience under their belts, and Trish insists there’s a certain strategy to tabling the fresh food she hauls to the market. Product amount and type are dependent on the time of year. No matter the seasonal vegetable, however, Trish has made a rule of having “one weird quirky thing on the table”. From purple carrots to rutabaga, she likes surprising the customers who come by her tent. The “something strange” isn’t all that sells. She also strategically stacks products to show abundance. No one will buy the last jar of pickles because they feel bad taking it, “So it’s always full”.

Trish grew up planting and pickling. Her father always had a big garden, fresh veggies ripe for the taking throughout her childhood. So, when Trish had children of her own, she kept up her outdoor hobby. When doctors told her that her oldest child had severe allergies to corn and soy (“You need to not eat out of a box anymore.”), the simple hobby grew unimaginably larger, feeding her son and a dream.

Trish is rooted in South Texas, branched out into Lubbock for college, and eventually blossomed in Fort Worth where she married her husband, Jack, and had three sons, Nate, Jackson, and Cru. Both Jack and Trish came from corporate America. They spent about 20 years in suits before wondering what else they were going to do with life. Their answer came as their children did, the middle son was diagnosed with Autism, and the youngest with Cystic Fibrosis and Type 1 Diabetes.

The small garden Trish started to safely fuel her family became a community garden. “We have a property out here (just outside Whiskey Flats on the site of the old Burleson pipe yard) where we put in like six rows. And then that became thirty-six rows, and that became sixty rows. A family friend of ours said ‘What are you going to do with all this excess?’. So, we started selling vegetables.”

Thus, Stone’s Throw Farm was born. A small grocery store, farmland, and traveling delivery trucks (three of them!) make up the nonprofit organization. Besides healthy, local food, they adopted the mission of serving other special needs families. “We have nine interns, age range fifteen to fifty-three”, Trish explains, detailing the variety of attributes the interns possess from Autism to hearing loss to being paralyzed from the chest down. The farm gives them a place with a purpose. Most of them earn a wage and all learn social and life skills.

Trish, Jack, and their tiny team of interns choose to sell their produce, meats, and eggs at Clearfork over any other location in Fort Worth for several reasons. “There’s plenty of parking. It’s a good area. At the time [we saw it], it was spring and there was yoga happening and live music and it was great”. They described how bigger markets have too much competition and repetition between farms. “If I go to Clearfork, there’s like four farmers instead of thirty-four. It has kind of naturally worked out to all of us having different things. One farmer only does heirloom produce and one that only does pickles and jams and one that does meat. It’s a good mix of not too many farmers but you still have enough”.

Trish is all plant and Jack is all plan, and the Clearfork market simply suited their respective vibes: customer-friendly, fresh, and efficient.

“The tents look great,” Trish added. “The tents match. I found out they [the market] own those tents so you don’t have to bring your own tent. I was like someone’s gonna put my tent up? Like yes!

It’s so funny, the small things that matter”.

Small isn’t an insult to Clearfork. The other market that calls Tarrant County home is Cowtown, a larger market with an extra ten or so vendors located at 3821 Southwest Blvd. It’s the oldest market in Fort Worth, dating back to 1986. It’s open Saturday and Wednesday, tends to draw a bigger, more rotational crowd, and product overlap occurs more often. While competition fostered by this environment tends to be beneficial when it comes to increasing quality and quantity, market vendors are already impressive in these regards. They ensure they have plenty of products of a high caliber. Vendors rely on the local people who are committed to buying items on Saturday mornings. Usually, the same people who trust and know them. The bigger the sales area becomes, the less likely a customer is to buy one homegrown veggie over another. Spending money at farmers markets keeps it in circulation within the local community, preserving and creating local jobs. Local farms selling fruits and vegetables employ thirteen full-time workers per $1 million in revenue earned, for a total of 61,000 jobs in 2008. The Farmers Market Coalition also says farmers market vendors pocket upwards of 90 cents for each dollar of sales there compared to 15.6 cent return for US farmers overall. The smaller the community, the more it can thrive, and the more each dollar is worth. A little extra dough never hurts.

Trent Shaskan looks like a fit, southern version of Santa. A wide smile, rosy cheeks, and a trim build both complement and contrast his product: fluffy sourdough bread.

He’s from Northern California, San Francisco specifically, and according to Trent, being from there meant sourdough bread was a regular part of the daily diet. He used to shop for it with his grandparents. Despite this young (but endearing) love for carbs, Trent pursued a very different career path, opting to become a political science professor after getting his Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University. According to Rate My Professor, Trent was a top-notch teacher at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His students loved him, launching his quality score to an impressive 4.5, but Trent had an idea in the oven.

With the encouragement and expertise of his wife and longtime culinary expert Dena, the couple launched Icon Bread and Mockingbird Food Co. when they moved to Fort Worth. The company specializes in making sourdough bread, soups, entrees, fermented goods, and other chef-driven products. “The business developed over time,” Trent said. “Nine-tenths of success is just showing up”.

So for years, he did, selling his first batches of bread at the West 7th Farmers Market and rising from there. “I make sourdough now full time and say it is those early tastes that drive the business, trying mostly to replicate childhood memories of what sourdough should be like”, he explained. The kinds of bread change often as Trent experiments with flavors and textures to achieve his nostalgic goals. He bakes swiss caramelized onion and thyme, walnut raisin, semolina sesame, raisin rosemary, serrano cheddar, Yecora Rojo, Texas rye raisin molasses, hot cherry pepper with provolone, Quanah wheat, and garlic rosemary (just to name a few).

And people ate it up, every flavor, allowing the business to expand to showcase not just Trent and Dena’s goods but other local foods from Fort Worth culinary startups. But, bigger (even in Texas) isn’t always better, so Trent likes to keep it intimate when it comes to markets.

“Clearfork has just been amazing. It’s been the second catalyst for Icon Bread and the business we have now,” Trent commented. “Making and especially selling sourdough is a very interactive process. People want to talk about it and Clearfork is the perfect place to do that!”. He’s been selling there for seven years now and swears by the importance of consistency. “Showing up, quality product, but primarily interaction, conversation, true interest and caring for the people that shop there and want to connect” makes for a successful business, but also a great recipe for lasting relationships. “We have many friends and regulars at Clearfork. Food builds community this way- long-term presence, listening, being consistent, explaining the ingredients, telling stories- getting to know people and letting them get to know us. Very, very much a two-way thing,” he insisted.

Trent loves sourdough and he loves the market because each is a natural avenue for human interaction; silly, meaningful, and honest.

“It all goes down at Clearfork, we like to say!”

Gina Propp met Trent when she first started selling at Clearfork and is now stationed just a tent away from the piles of bread loaves. Any other day of the week, she can be found at 105 S. Main Street, selling from a decked-out silver trailer. The inside of Gina Propp’s Airstream food truck smells heavenly of oven-baked granola, sitting fresh on metal trays or stored in giant labeled buckets. Everything is organized for function, evidenced by Gina’s ease of movement as she quickly fulfills an order totaling over fifty dollars.

Fifty dollars of granola.

She went to college in Denver, Colorado, and graduated with a degree in interior design. “I laugh about that,” she said, “that I get to use my space planning skills, and this is what I’m using it for”. Gina is referring to her business of Crunchy Girl Granola, a BYOJ (bring your own jar), save mother nature, eat clean, and live happy type of gig.

Gina worked several years in interior design, hopped from Denver to Fort Worth to be near her husband’s family, had kids, and took a fourteen-year sabbatical from the professional world. When she finally had the time and desire to pick back up in her field, she struggled. “It was kind of a shock to the system. Interviews weren’t face-to-face anymore. It was all technology. It was hard to get an interview in the design world, so I went into culinary”.

The food world was flexible, perfect for allowing Gina the time to care for her kids. She stuck with it for four years, mostly working on the administrative side of it- taking customer calls, planning events, scheduling, that sort of thing. All the while, it was creativity in her own kitchen making an impact on food.

“I’ve been making granola for a really long time- like twenty years- and giving it away during holidays to my friends, my family, my neighbors, and all of my husband’s coworkers. They always looked forward to it, so I knew it was really delicious, but I didn’t think about selling it”. Legally, Gina would have a rough time selling her snacks. Food laws restricted people from selling food directly out of their homes and kitchens in Texas until 2011. Then, the Texas Cottage Food Law allowed people to sell homemade food that did not require time or temperature control for safety. Crunchy, clean granola fit the bill, and Gina launched her business.

“September 2019 was my first event. It was definitely slow-ish at first”. But she figured sharing her granola beyond friends would be a challenge and kept at it, going to different farmers markets in the area as she grew.

“I kept building and came to the Clearfork Market. That’s my number one market”.

In her Airstream trailer, Gina sells everything from granola to smoothie bowls to oatmeal to desserts, expanding beyond her initial oven specialty. But at the market, she keeps it scoopable, enlisting the help of those she affectionately calls “granola girls and guys (well, one guy, he’s a favorite)” to help show people her delicious product and speak to its low waste nature. “All my containers are compostable. I compost all the smoothie scraps and coffee grounds and filters. The three R’s are important of course. I just try not to create too much junk you know? As far as the granola, it’s basic, natural, and wholesome ingredients. It’s pretty good for you”.

Gina wakes up at 5:30, packs the granola she and her crew have been prepping all week, and leaves for Clearfork at 6:30 to arrive by 7:00. “It’s usually super quiet and hopefully not too cold”. Gina sells the granola loose out of bins. She’s got almond, original (a mixture of pecan and walnut), and Trinity Trail Mix, named for the nearby walking and biking path. “It’s kind of a visual thing for people to watch you make it, like ‘Cocktail’ that very old movie from the 80s”. She’s referring to Tom Cruise’s bartending “flair” in the film, catching the eyes of willing women across the counter. In a much less creepy way, Gina hopes to ensnare the attention of customers, new and frequent, with her story and granola as she mixes and packages it.

“The people are so constant. There’s a lot of support with people returning. It’s kind of like a party”. With all the attractions accompanying the market’s ideal location- restaurants, the river, biking and hiking trails, apartment complexes, and a modern outdoor shopping center- all kinds of people encounter the vendors. “You’ve got running groups and biking groups, moms and strollers, the yoga people, and people just coming to find great food. It’s a great vibe”. Gina really pulls from the energy of her customers, even if she can’t make the market every Saturday.

I’m starting to realize why someone might happily drop fifty bucks on granola if it tastes as good as it does and comes from such a dedicated mother and businesswoman. It’s important to Gina, to every vendor at Clearfork, that a person knows where their product comes from. It’s important to them that customers know their names, their faces, and their stories. The vendors themselves are a little family.

“Gosh, I love the vendors,” Gina sighed. “I’ve learned so much from them. I’ve met some wonderful people over the years. Talking to the vendors week after week and getting to know them, their families, their products, and getting to support those guys as well… there are so many great people out there making so many great things”.

Gina smiled a lot, dusted her hands off on her bright orange apron, and gifted me a generous amount of her seasonal chocolate granola. She may consider herself a business rookie, but she’s clearly a granola sales expert.

Maybe a lack of corporate savvy is more beneficial than not, allowing Gina and other market vendors to authentically streamline producer-consumer connection. Walter Hugo Anez and Michael R. Thomsen from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, studied characteristics of farmers markets’ producers and consumers, unveiling several findings. First, the strategy of direct marketing (i.e. face to face interaction with a customer) allows farmers to grow as they meet consumer preferences retail grocery stores lack. Secondly, it details that shoppers place value on quality, nutrition, knowledge of produce, atmosphere, and desire to support local vendors. Most shoppers felt the most important aspect of the market to be this commitment to local farmers, fueling a consistent relationship between producer and consumer. “Many of the positive consumer perceptions involve not only benefits that concern the exchange of commodities, but also those related to social interaction caused by the congregation and association of producers and consumers,” Anez concluded. The Clearfork Market fosters this avenue of direct connection, allowing for clean production and knowledgeable consumption like honeybees spinning nectar into sticky sweetness.

Stelian Done suffered a bee sting as a kid. In Romania, his father had been a beekeeper, and one day, he finally decided it was time to show his boy the ins and outs of the job. He led young Stelian to the trove of bees he was taking care of. Stelian was excited.

“No one knows this, you know,” Stelian reveals. “No one knows this.” The story goes, the little boy received a single bee sting on the back of his left or right hand (he couldn’t recall). His skin began to itch from his toes to the last hair on his head. He bade me to scratch the more gruesome and embarrassing details from the record, but to put it simply, the kid almost died. His father kept him away from bees, and Stelian grew up separated from his father’s practice.

Fast forward fourteen years. Stelian is married and objectively crazy because in 2000, he tells his wife “We have to buy some bees”. He decides to purchase fifteen columns of bees to pick up where his father left off, despite his horrific childhood run-in with near-death-by-sting.

“I pray,” he says. “I pray I pray.”

On the day he purchased the bees, he removed the columns from his car, and Stelian received fifteen bee stings. Nothing happened. His skin didn’t swell. His throat didn’t close. He was completely fine. So, he continued.

In 2006 he moved from Romania to Fort Worth, nudged along by a church immigration program, and resumed beekeeping in 2012. Now he’s known as SD Captain Bee, taking care of bees, harvesting their products, and safely removing hives from unideal locations around town. “It’s not like Romania. The work is harder, in terms of honey.” Stelian’s struggles stem from a shortened North Texas growing season, limiting the wildflowers his bees need to thrive. Additionally, increased housing construction and other land development have squished his once large property into a tiny lot surrounded by concrete, harming his bees. “This year, people tell me ‘I didn’t see any bees’. Of course, you didn’t.” He sadly shook his head, but his eyes remained fierce. Despite the challenges, Stelian still manages to sell his product at the Clearfork market every Saturday, displaying several types of honey and advocating for the small producers (human and bee alike).

Clearfork was close, practical, and drew a big crowd, but Stelian didn’t just choose the market for logical reasons. “Here, we are producer. Every vendor works with their hands. I like it in this way,” he stated passionately. People here don’t buy something to sell it again. They make it, grow it, nourish it, create it. The vendors cared about the process and the story, and so did Stelian. He fits right into the hive and intends to stick around.

“Here, we are producer."

I eventually release Stelian to the swarm of people searching for honeycomb and conversation, retreating from the crowd, down the gravel path, past smiling vendors whose gingham-covered tables are clearing of content, through throngs of friends and families and pets, to the parking lot still packed with cars. The sky managed to stay dry during the event, but a breeze brings the promising scent of rain as the day continues beyond the market.

These same people (and perhaps more newcomers like myself) will return next Saturday. They’ll come back the Saturday after that, and again the following weekend. This community of food and friendship is a wholesome sort of addiction. One fresh vegetable or plate of eggs, one loaf of bread or scoop of granola, one jar of honey… and you’re hooked not just on the products, but the people. Food fuels connection at Clearfork, and the market will continue to be an active communal space in Fort Worth so long as producers and consumers desire it,

“We have one lady who was our customer,” Trish Stone recalled, “who wasn’t pregnant. And then, you notice that she’s pregnant. And then she has the baby. And now the baby’s talking. And this whole time, she’s been our customer. You know, you just keep these relationships up with people and they become your friends. That’s the best part.”