Healthy, Locally Grown Food is a Good Thing.

Our family strives to eat the freshest food we can get and avoid packaged, processed product as much as possible. We do not always get it right but we are getting better and for that the entire family also feels better. Our home city of Calgary is growing like crazy. Stress is high, traffic is fast, staff is hard to find and housing is expensive. I believe to effectively deal with these urban stresses one must eat well, sleep well and have a place to simply get away. Our local farmers market is just that place for me and that is why I wrote the following letter to the editor is response to an article suggesting it will be closed down to make way for a new chain retailer.

Dear Sirs,

In reference to your Sunday Herald Future of the farmers market article.

I am a business owner in Calgary and a weekly customer of the Calgary Farmers Market. I travel North America wide on Business and have rarely seen a better market than the Calgary Farmers Market. We purchase all our food for our household of 5 from there and are very pleased to eat healthy, locally grown, seasonal food and to support other local small business.

It would be a crime to allow this outstanding example of how regional growers can service an urban population to go away because it might not fit in to Canada Lands idea of a “European-styled High street looking place”. I thought I lived in a great city and region and do not understand why we have to take away our own style to try to look like something else.

I strongly encourage all parties interested to be vocal and start a petition in support of keeping this city jewel intact and hopefully expanding. If we do the right thing here, we might just find folks over in Europe planning a Calgary style farmers market that is a healthy, happy place to purchase regionally grown foods and support small home grown businesses.

In closing, I suggest that it would not be possible to find a better anchor tenant in this development than our own proven Calgary Farmers Market.

Sincerely,

Louis Stack