Robin Schirmer
You may know her as Robin Winter, or robininwinter, but her real name is Robin Schirmer, and she’ll be providing The Market Watch on The Local Beet. Robin’s own local food cred is fairly recent—she converted through reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle a few summers ago; but she jumped in with both feet. She’s admittedly still a work-in-progress as a local eater, but is doing a lot to enable the rest of us. Robin is a self-described "farmers market groupie" and has seen dozens of farmers markets from all sides: as manager/coordinator (which includes attending lots of markets to “troll for vendors”), as market seller, as a consumer. • As many of you who read the Beet already know, she has coordinated over 50 indoor winter farmers markets in church venues around Chicagoland over the last three winter seasons. • You might recognize Robin as the regular presence every Thursday in summer 2008 selling a variety of organic products at the Daley Plaza Farmers Market for Midwest Organic Farmers Cooperative. • Since last March, she has worked with Tomato Mountain Farm, boosting their Chicago-area farmers market presence from 6 to over 20 markets last summer, staffing them and selling at most of them at one time or another. • As part of the nascent effort to create a statewide Farmers Market Association in Illinois, Robin has kept the most up-to-date list of Illinois farmers markets and contact information, and informally tracks new markets each year. Robin will report on the markets she coordinates and attends for Tomato Mountain, as well as new markets she learns about. Please chime in with your own market experiences, new markets you learn about, and to let us know what you’d like to hear about on The Market Watch.
Posts by Robin Schirmer:
