Green City Market

Green City Market, A Song of Thanks celebrates founder Abby Mandel and the advent of the Know your food-know your farmer movement. Inspired by Alice Waters, but challenged by the shorter midwestern growing season, Abby defied the status quo and introduced seasonal, organic, sustainably farmed food to Chicago. Wooing farmers, chefs, and introducing a new mindset to shoppers, she created a legendary institution that spawned a network of farmers markets across the country. In this 20th...
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Green City Market, A Song of Thanks celebrates founder Abby Mandel and the advent of the Know your food-know your farmer movement. Inspired by Alice Waters, but challenged by the shorter midwestern growing season, Abby defied the status quo and introduced seasonal, organic, sustainably farmed food to Chicago. Wooing farmers, chefs, and introducing a new mindset to shoppers, she created a legendary institution that spawned a network of farmers markets across the country. In this 20th anniversary reprise of Chicago's Green City Market, photographer Sharon Hoogstraten has crafted a moving homage to Abby's work and the market. Using a vintage poem by Edward Smyth Jones as a narrative script, essays from Chicago's top chefs, and two hundred pages of beautiful photography, she gives us a visual retrospective and permanent souvenir of a market you either know well-or will wish you did.Abby Mandel, chef, culinary genius, food columnist, was the creator of the Green City Market, an organic, sustainable and certified farmers market. Alice Waters called it "the best sustainable market in the country."Edward Smyth Jones, son of a Mississippi sharecropper, who longed to study at Harvard produced an extraordinary volume of poetry including A Song of Thanks. Published in 1911, this poem challenged the photographer and illuminates the market produce and seasons.An award-winning photographer, Sharon Hoogstraten has been documenting the Green City Market since 2008.