St. Thomas doesn’t grow fruit the way you probably think of people growing fruit,” explained my brother, as we drove down one of the island’s vertiginous corkscrew roads, pointing out what he called a family banana patch, a dozen banana trees growing in front of a cement-block house. I of the northern zucchini and tomato patch craned my neck. Then he went on to explain all the various fruit trees he had slowly discovered on the grounds of his house: passion fruit, mangoes, avocadoes, limes, and more. He told me he lets his coconuts rot on the trees, because to get them when they’re good eating means climbing to the treetop with a machete. By the time fall the coconuts fall of their own volition they’re past prime for human consumption, though perfect for seeding new coconuts. Who knew? People who live near coconut trees, no doubt.
My brother and his wife moved down to St. Thomas, the main commercial island in the American Virgin Islands, about two years ago. In December they had a little girl, and I was there to visit my niece and soak up some sunshine. Little did I know that this trip would also turn some of my notions about farmers markets on their heads.
You see, in Minnesota where I live, when you walk through a farmers market and see a table ringed by boxes of papayas and coconuts, that’s a bad thing. We call those sellers truck farmers, meaning their “farm” is the loading dock where they stocked their truck. So it was quite a mind boggle for me to walk through the farmers market in Charlotte Amalie, the capital of the American Virgin Islands, on St. Thomas, and realize that the tables ringed with coconuts, papayas, and mangoes are the freshest, most local tables there are. (Fingerling potatoes, meanwhile, cost $5 a pound and are available only in markets catering to the yachting crowd.) The market also hosted pick-up trucks lightly filled with reef fish, including huge gray angelfish and bony little bundles the locals call ham fish (the big glamour fish like tuna and mahi mahi go straight to the restaurants.)
Fruit and reef fish aside, it was really when we stumbled upon a booth presided over by a regal-looking woman with a tight turban that my mind cracked wide open. She got my attention when she wouldn’t let me buy a bottle of her hot sauce. “It’s too hot for you,” she said, shaking her head like a judge delivering sentence. “Too hot for you. Too hot.” (She let me buy a bottle of the second-hottest sauce; it was too hot for me.) But what was that, at her elbow? It was freshly harvested cinnamon. And in the yellow plastic jug? Fresh nutmeg, the mace exterior intact. Those she let me buy. Seven dollars later ($2 for the nutmeg, $5 for the cinnamon) I had spices fresh from the garden.
Later that night my brother made me a blender drink of local Cruzan rum, mangoes, coconut milk, and fresh grated cinnamon and nutmeg. It tasted as exotic as perfume, as unreal as pirate legends. Yet the truth of the matter was this: Here’s what it means to be a locavore in paradise.
The Farmer’s Market runs every Saturday morning from around 5 a.m. in Market Square, on Main Street in downtown Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands.
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