Farmers markets in the US

A sentence nobody planned to write: farmers markets and adult children moved back home in step. One imagines the millennial returning to their childhood bedroom and immediately being taken to a Saturday market for heirloom tomatoes. Therapy, via produce.

Both surged in 2020 for the same covid reason. A historic wave of young adults moved back in with their parents after losing jobs, leases, and campus housing — the share hit roughly 52%, the highest since the Great Depression — while farmers markets boomed as an outdoor, supply-chain-proof, socially-distanced grocery option. Two symptoms of the same pandemic: generational economic shock, and a country shopping outside.

So the correlation is a slightly melancholy family portrait: the kids back home, everyone shopping outside, the virus the unseen reason. Neither caused the other. Both were 2020.