prolific New Yorker writer John McPhee embedded with farmer Rich Hodgson to write about a fledgling crop of New York City farmers’ markets. His remarkable essay “Giving Good Weight” told the story of the Greenmarkets through the farmers’ eyes as they harvested and trucked their produce into the city and sold it in an “all day conversion of weight to cash.” Here’s a taste of one exchange with an urbanite at a Harlem market: “Woman says, ‘What is this stuff on these peaches?’ ”“It’s called fuzz.”“It was on your peaches last week, too.”“We don’t take it off. When you buy peaches in the store, the fuzz has been rubbed off.”“Well, I never.”“You never saw peach fuzz before? You’re kidding.”“I don’t like that fuzz. It makes me itchy. How much are the tomatoes?”“Three pounds for a dollar.”“Give me three pounds. Tomatoes don’t have fuzz.”I first encountered the story in 2006 as a restaurant line cook. Our menus changed almost daily during the Greenmarkets’ peak seasons, and I learned to shop and cook without an agenda, letting the glow of the produce and the amount of cash in my pocket dictate what dinner would be. Cook-ing from the markets taught me an obvious but profound lesson: Better ingredients make you a better cook. I also learned this: Markets matter. They connect you to a local economy and the pulse of a place.McPhee told me over the phone recently that he wasn’t mining for a story when he began the groundwork on “Giving Good Weight.” But like me, he felt the pull of the markets. One day of reporting turned into five months of selling peppers. McPhee captured the personalities of the farmers and the dense rhythms of the city with a pencil and 4 x 6–inch notebook that he kept tucked into his apron pocket, and his reporting yielded a late 1970s anthropological snapshot of the city. Our collective market culture has changed in the nearly 40 years since a customer gave McPhee the title for his story when she told him he “gave her good weight” in peppers. New York City now has 54 Greenmarkets. And the number of farmers’ markets across the country has grown 371% in the last 20 years, fueled by our craving for fresh local food.Celebrate the seasonal bounty with us in this issue, our annual Summer Cookbook, a collection of recipes and tips for getting the most out of your market experience, whether you’re buying sweet corn from a roadside stand or juicy tomatoes from under a white tent in the city. As always, our team strives to give you good weight.