Fyi if you didn't already know... the farmers' markets are themselves a type of middlemen. (At least every one I've shopped at in the USA.)

The farmers' market rents out the booth spaces to vendors (farmers). It's a real-world "platform" to bring together buyers and sellers. The farmers' cost to rent the space is embedded into the prices the consumers pay.

A true individual relationship with a farmer would be something like driving to Joel Salatin's Polyface Farms and buying broiler chickens directly from him. This bypasses the middlemen of farmers' markets.

reading omnivore's dilemma when it came out impulsively made me want to do that, but of course the impracticality of that quickly dawned on me. it's similarly why reading a book is a better than going and getting first-hand accounts for all our information. we've created socioeconomic structures for very good reasons, so we shouldn't want to burn them down for the tradeoffs, but rather we should address the negatives directly.

From a "commercial marketplace" POV, it's basically a farce. There's no security -- it's literally just a folding table full of food on someone's porch with a clipboard to mark that you've taken your share for the week -- and the supply varies with the weather, crop conditions, and even mundane things like "the delivery truck broke down this week; shares will be small and/or late."

And yet: everyone gets fed, the farmer gets paid, and it all ends up being price-competitive with a grocery store (much less a farmer's market).

We also patronize a farmer's market for the "showcase" products that succeed there: big pretty loaves of bread, flats of fruit, etc. It's still cheaper than any high-end grocery store, the shelf life is amazing b/c it hasn't traveled 1000 miles on a truck, and we get to interact directly with the folks who make the food.

The catch -- and it's a big one, in terms of classic microeconomic indicators -- is that we can't get an arbitrary amount of any chosen good at a competitive price right on the spot. Want peaches, but the stall sold out or bugs got this week's share? Sorry; hope cherries are okay this week. Don't like turnips or beets? Well, you might need to trade with someone who does, or find a new way to prepare 'em.

There's also no "economy of scale" to speak of; the largest vendors are probably a couple of bakers who make O(thousands) of loaves per day, or the ranchers and fishermen who show up with coolers full of frozen steaks and fillets (b/c one cow or fishing boat load actually feeds a lot of people).

Oh, and basically every farmer's market is also a localized barter economy. If you watch you can see the vendors roaming between stalls, offering trades and samples with other purveyors. After-hours, there are a _lot_ of boxes of food moving from one stall to another just before the left-overs get loaded back into the truck.

So yes, strictly speaking these are all "marketplaces". It's a far cry though from Amazon swooping in to undercut the successful products on their own platform, or any major store chain selling shelf space to the highest bidder to create -- rather than respond to -- consumer demand.

Obviously it doesn't work for every product or service, but there's definitely a space to accept a little less efficiency in favor of community-level resilience.

The efficiency is dependent on what you're measuring - food per land area? Food per energy input? Energy output per energy input?

The supplier has one trip to make to sell their current stock.

The consumer has one trip to make to buy multiple items that they're interested in (since this is a market).

You would have thought that a former policymaker/lobbyist would have known better than the market...he went to Harvard you known. But it turns out that there is a reason why businesses have been organized this way for the past three centuries.