Eating Oberlin City II: The Bailey’s Farm Market Conundrum
by Sebastian Cruz, Cuban Sandwich
Illustration by Emma Shoaf, Layout Assistant
In the last edition of this then-brand-new column, the virtues of a good home-cooked meal was perhaps waylaid by the fresh-faced optimism of another new eatery to fit into the lineup of establishments. The temptation of a meal prepared for you and you alone keeps many students, townies, even thrifty professors on the hook for infinite possibilities in Oberlin City Dining.
It’s very easy to discount the home meal, at least as far as this column goes as of now, it’s possible to interpret home cooking as the lesser of culinary adventures. Even meals one does make at home, in the current context of modern eating, the practice has come to boil down to ready-out-of-that-fire-alarm-triggering-microwave meals swept up from the back of the Decafe shelves or the bottom of the Walmart Ramen section where dreams go to die. In short, home cooking is, to most of our cohort, a luxury one may only abstractly yearn for, whispering “one day…”
Accessibility is a fucker. Accessibility to food and meals that may dredge us out of the one-stop-shop Monopoly the college holds over us all by cordoning us into dorms with one kitchen, or if you’re the luckiest of lucky, dorms that have been outfitted with all the requisite amenities that seem to suggest independent meal-making. But with just a microwave to guide us through the cold cold night, the smallest counterspace known to God and man alike, windows to trap the indecent fumes were one to actually cook something. To my seniors in arms who made it out of the muck into the Village Housing Heaven, god be with ye, and to the rest of us, the message is loud and clear: home cooking is there if you want it, and you really gotta want it.
Consider Bailey’s Farm Market, opened just this past October by fourth-generation 13 Main Street-ers. In spite of this anti-home-cooking infrastructure the college is more than happy to let us writhe in, the presence of a well-and-true grocery store naught but a simple walk downtown away is a very attractive proposition for us kids. This want for accessibility that undergirds much of the student populace’s needs and desires is a perfect complement to Bailey’s presence. Now, since the IGA is all but boarded up, condemned and left to decay in the space of public memory, and since Walmart and Aldi are a hop, skip and ten minute drive from where we stand, Bailey’s seems the perfect antidote.
Unfortunately, the purpose of Bailey’s may remain immaterial to much of this student populace. The majority of students are crushed under thousands of plateaus of commitments, deadlines, time taken up by the eternal churn of collegiate despair we seem to love, time that cooking can’t fit into, with resources we don’t have. I hate to harp forever, but for old-time’s sake, let us remember that thirteen percent of the student population live in a dorm fitted with kitchenettes as far as the eye can muster, airless windows and that singular kitchen that you, yes you, will never get your hands on. To many students, Bailey’s may only be a window-shopper’s destination, a storefront of uncountable “that would be nice”s.
The community, however, could only benefit from such a place. I’m a defender of the eternal virtue of restauranting-as-community engagement, since I’m a sucker and above-average eats don’t scare me like they used to. But an honest-to-goodness establishment in the downtown area, fitted with smart, natural and outwardly friendly foodstuffs that’ll make your cardiologist skip to their lou can’t be anything but a major crossover into a more equitable state of edibility. Alongside an Asian Food Mart such as Kim’s, Bailey’s is a resource not unlike any number of food outlets one may find in a city with a population orders of magnitude larger than the college and city count combined.
Bailey’s is a decidedly urban phenomenon, in spite of its Farm Market moniker, yet this is hardly a bad thing. Of course, the selection is not far-reaching, dangerously diverse like any King Shit supermarket chain outside of the city limits. The rub lies in speciality, prime cuts of meat you won’t regret having in your fridge come the next day, actual goddamn produce you can hold with both hands no matter the day, no matter the unknowable machinations of the Decafe gods or the Stevenson Dining Hall staff giving you side-eyes for pilfering as many bananas and apples you can stuff inside your winter jacket (guilty!)
Yes, the look of Bailey’s, the smart millennialesque off-white and white panelling, the slight rustic tinge could be dangerously close to inauthentic, if it weren’t for the mere purpose of the storefront: raw ingredients. I’ve explained this in the last issue, about how restaurants are people to converse with, and so too is food itself. Food talks to you, sometimes says nasty things, but most of the time can be imbued with good faith if you let it. This extends to the owners, proprietors and managers of this Farm Market. Aesthetics are for seeing, fluff without circumstance. The food is literally, and I mean literally, what you make it. Just as long as you have at least an acquaintance in a Village House who can lend you their stove for half an hour.
