Dekalb Farmers Market: Table to the World

A megastore that nurtures both the body and the soul, metro Atlanta institution has touched – and changed – lives

Two things strike you when you walk into the DeKalb Farmers Market. Not just strike you, but reach out and grab you: the smell and the cold. 

Jayshri Joshi doesn't notice the smell anymore – that fecund overload of fish guts and wet mops, of mangoes with their memory of the tropics, of chickens roasting and samosas frying. Of cheese, of meat, of half-sour pickles and of people. People riding forklifts and people pushing buggies with drowsy children inside. People sitting in dark, lonely corners stocking boxes of pasta, and people raking their fingers through the cool promise of Georgia green peanuts, looking for the tiniest and sweetest to surface in the pile.

Joshi doesn't smell that smell because after five years of daily exposure, she is inured to it the way cat owners no longer smell their pets in the house. But she feels the cold – the 65-degree temperature that keeps the leaf lettuces pert and the blue crabs feisty in their open bins. She stands at the customer service desk by the door wearing a winter coat and cupping hot coffee in her hand; the coffee, poured from a thermos, is as milky and sweet as Indian chai. 

There are no farmers at this farmers market. The food is sold by employees from 30 countries who work in pairs, based on the owner's theory that they need to balance each other's expanding and contracting energy. Behind their blue coats and sometimes stumbling English, they are a collection of people who, before arriving, were bankers and teachers, economists and military officers. They escaped famine and fled the Taliban. 

They landed in this world market just outside Decatur, a market that has thrived by catering to immigrants while spinoff Harry's Farmers Market struggled. It is a market so unique on the American landscape that competing grocers and tour groups of preschoolers come to gawk.

Every day 7,000 people come through, and Joshi sees all the regulars. The willowy man in his lime-green caftan who stops shoppers to tell them, "Every day on this Earth is a blessing!" The tall, balding fellow who wants cilantro with roots for some mysterious purpose. The real estate agent beelining toward the cafeteria for his daily date with the steam table. The retiree who rides a bus 80 miles once a week to shop.

Joshi's name tag informs customers she speaks English, Hindi and Gujarati, the last being her native tongue from her homeland in northern India. But everyone speaks English to her. A woman with a singsong Caribbean accent and kinky blond hair offsetting her cafe au lait skin approaches the desk with a bag of pistachios.

"These weren't good the last time I got them, " the woman says. "Not any good at all. I won't buy more until I try them first." Joshi waggles her head from side to side – the Indian sign of assent – and slices open the bag with a penknife.

"Please, try one, " Joshi says. The customer extracts one nut with two inch-long orange fingernails, pulls it from its shell and thoughtfully chews before agreeing to buy.

"You can go get a fresh bag, " says Joshi.

When Joshi's day is finished at 5 p.m., she packs up her shoulder bag and walks home. It isn't far – out behind the market, down a road where kudzu leaps from the woods, hurdles up and over chain-link fences, and reaches its tendrils out to the pavement. Home is a squat apartment block where, suddenly, everyone around speaks Gujarati. 

A family affair

The doors to several apartments are open, and plastic outdoor furniture loiters on the common lawn. The smell of Indian spices hovers near the building, finding a welcoming home in the moist air. Inside one apartment, Joshi's sister Rehka Patel is cooking and her brother-in-law, Ashok Patel, is sitting on the sofa watching TV. This is home, a two-bedroom flat the three of them, all market employees, share.

Rekha snaps and strips the peas from guwar beans. She drops black mustard seeds into hot oil, causing them to let off staccato pops and a nose-tingling fragrance, and adds the beans. Then she mixes dough. Every night they make fresh flat breads. There's no hurry – dinner's at 8 – so Joshi goes to her bedroom to pray by the photo of her late husband.

An Atlanta institution, the market draws loyal shoppers attracted by its eccentric mix of organics and international exotica as well as newcomers and tourists who go for the sheer eye-popping spectacle of the place.

After all, where else can you find spelt-flour rotini, bitter melons, lamb testicles, furiously snapping crabs, organic lard and all-natural raspberry-ginger cereal flakes under a canopy of international flags?

Rhode Island grocer Robert Blazer opened the DeKalb Farmers Market as a produce stand in 1977 in the Medlock neighborhood of Decatur. Soon thereafter Blazer brought in his younger musician brother, Harry, to help manage the growth of the market, which had expanded its offerings far beyond produce. It had become a gourmet haven that attracted food enthusiasts from throughout the city. Customers knew the two brothers well – Robert, the soft-spoken introvert with mop-top hair, and Harry, the flamboyant showman with his trademark bushy mustache.

By 1986 the market had outgrown its space, and Robert Blazer moved it to its current 100,000-plus-square-foot location a mile away. It was frequently in the news at that time, and not only for its revolutionary scale. Some former employees filed a class action lawsuit, characterizing Blazer's management doctrine as a "New Age quasi-religious cult." Even Harry Blazer spoke out against the market's management practices and left to found the competing chain of Harry's Farmers Markets. He opened the first location in what The Atlanta Journal-Constitution described at the time as "the bucolic community of Alpharetta." 

Despite their disagreements, these two brothers not only changed Atlanta's food shopping habits, they created – each in his own way – a widely imitated template for gourmet retailing in America.

Chuck Gilmer, editor of the Norcross-based Shelby Report, a national grocery trade publication, credits the DeKalb and Harry's farmers markets with introducing upscale prepared foods to the country ("getting past fried chicken and doughnuts") and with encouraging food markets to expand their seafood and meat offerings. Food retailers flew to Atlanta in the early 1990s to study their innovations.

Harry's dominated the news during Atlanta's go-go expansion and went public in a barrage of national press.

The DeKalb market stayed privately owned by Robert Blazer, who has never released sales or revenue figures.

Harry's tried to show its concept could work everywhere, expanding to three megastores and six Harry's in a Hurry gourmet takeout shops.

The DeKalb market watched its changing neighborhood, adding more Indian and Caribbean products to the increasingly weird mix.

Harry's hired celebrity chef Scott Peacock to develop pastries.

DeKalb sold samosas, fried tofu and steamed chard in its cafeteria.

Harry's spiraled into debt, never turning a profit from 1993 until the younger Blazer sold the megastores to Whole Foods in 2001. 

DeKalb added 40,000 square feet of space to accommodate its new status as Atlanta's world market. It now employs 470 people from 30 countries, and it's these people who perhaps offer the best clue to its continued success.

During its 27 years, this food store has become a unique kind of town square, in a county where 60 languages are spoken and one out of 10 residents have emigrated within the past decade. Here shoppers can walk alongside their near but unknown neighbors and see what they eat, what clothes they wear, how they interact with their children. In the jostling, noisy interior of this market, side-by-side communities don't dissociate immediately into their separate realities, but combine briefly into an unstable compound – a new culture. 

And for each of the people whose lives the market has touched, the story always begins with the smell.

A source of pride

Reti Canaj remembers the smell, that first whiff six years ago. She and her husband, Ali, had been in America for only two weeks – refugees who had entered a green card lottery and won. They sold their home for plane fare and left Albania, the poorest nation in Europe, with two small children and three suitcases. They took only clothes, a stainless steel pressure cooker and two kitchen knives. They left their parents and their country, which had lurched from dictatorship and seclusion during the Cold War to financial desperation after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Reti Canaj was a bank manager who saw her clients lose their homes and businesses in pyramid schemes that had wrecked the country's economy.

And so, here she was in Georgia in August, sweltering in a one-room apartment with mattresses on the floor. Her Albanian-American sponsor, Flora, said she would take her to a market to show her something special. And then she added, "Just don't let the smell bother you." 

Flora took Reti into the market and pointed to the ceiling, where hundreds of national flags hung. "I looked up and saw our flag, " Canaj recalls, "and I began to cry. It was like I saw my people."

Canaj, with her university education, didn't speak enough English to find work. She applied for jobs and was turned down. A&P wouldn't hire her to bag groceries. She eventually got work as a maid at a hotel, where a kind manager named Melissa told her not to be disappointed, that life would get better. "I didn't know what that meant, disappointed." 

Canaj studied English at home and decided to apply at the market. She was scared of failure and took along her 6yearold daughter, Silva, to help translate. She rarely spoke English to anyone other than Melissa. 

The first step was a written test in English and math. Canaj completed the exam and handed it to a Bangladeshi administrator in the market office. The woman flipped through it and said that she had done well, to come back for an interview without her daughter. There might be a job. "At that moment, " Canaj says, "I started to be happy."

Canaj has done well at the market – from her first job as a cashier to her current one as co-director of human relations. Now she administers the tests and doles out hope. She works in an office up in a skybox, eye level with the flags. She can look down and see the bustle – children craning their necks by the live crabs, yuppies sniffing cheese, the mad multiculti rush for summer mangoes. And she occasionally sees people with necks craned, looking for their flags. Sometimes they cry. "The Africans, " she says, "are usually so happy when they see their flag. They point and laugh."

Opposites paired

It is Tuesday, application day. People who want to work at the market arrive promptly at 9 a.m. to take the written test that Canaj hands out. Usually about 40 people come and take desks in the big conference room. Today's crowd consists mostly of East Africans from Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea plus a scattering of Iraqis and Afghans.

"We have an extensive cheese department at the market, " the test reads. "Some smell sweet and some smell strong. Cheese can be made from sheep, goat or cow's milk."

"Do some cheeses smell strong?"

"What is cheese made from?"

Canaj sits in her office with her partner, a carefully coiffed Ethiopian woman named Adanech Gebremariam. 

Canaj and Gebremariam work closely as a pair, as do all the market employees. Canaj wears a white dot on her name tag, which means that she has "expanding energy." Gebremariam wears a black dot for "contracting energy." 

When employees are hired at the market, Robert Blazer gives them a personality test and assigns them a type. Those with expanding energy are thinkers, ideators, people who come up with better systems to complete their work. Those with contracting energy are doers, brawn to the other's brains, people who know that the best way to do a job is to get it done. Each working pair consists of one white dot and one black dot. 

"Robert believes you work best when you have good relationships with friends and family, " says art department manager Ashley Vinson. Employees are always referred to in pairs. There's Thuy and Tuha in flowers. Latif and Jai in wine. Yussuf and Tesfaye in supplies. 

After three years together, Canaj and Gebremariam seem two sides of a coin. They are like spouses who finish each other's sentences, taking a thought halfway, then punting it over for the other to finish. They eat in each other's homes and share recipes. Gebremariam now makes Albanian soups for her family.

A taste for cilantro

The cashiers can identify the thousands of market products by their numeric codes. They are tested routinely for accuracy, and they can differentiate purple-stemmed Vietnamese spinach from loose-leaf spinach. They recognize by sight the tied bunches of yellow root, the shiny fresh water chestnuts, the slender green stalks of meri gai choy and the dirty brown lumps called boniato. 

Few people in Atlanta know what to do with these ingredients as well as Dr. Tim Dondero. A medical epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dondero has lived and cooked in Malaysia, Cameroon, India, Thailand and Jamaica, among other places. Now at home in Druid Hills, he picks a different world destination for dinner every night, consulting his 2,000 cookbooks and his computer files.

He is the tall, bald man who periodically pesters the customer service desk for cilantro with roots and thanks them profusely when it comes in. A skilled practitioner of Thai cooking, Dondero grinds the roots with a mortar and pestle for Thai curries and marinades.

And as he goes through the aisles on his weekly market visit, his mind switches countries like someone with an ethnic cook's remote control.

Click: "These little zucchini are just right for Mediterranean stuffed vegetables." Click: "This Hungarian Swiss cheese is a bargain and makes great fondue." Click: "These snow pea shoots are way too expensive, but I love them." Click: "I buy all my candied fruits here during Christmas to make fruitcake." Fruitcake and cilantro roots: the pantry of a one-of-a-kind cook. 

Dondero admits that he may come to the market with a short shopping list but then end up "spending an hour or more wandering around. This place makes me happy, maybe because I get such good associations from it."

'A little bit of tragedy'

As Dondero wanders the market, activity swirls around him.

Sophie Smulders escorts 40 children from the Pace Academy preschool on a tour and hoists an enormous bunch of basil in front of one startled kid, nearly engulfing his head. "Here's a good smell, " she says cheerily.

Jayshri Joshi patiently explains to a peeved customer that she may not exit through the entrance to fetch a shopping cart. 

A lone crawfish has made a break from the fish counter and crawls across the floor, nearly reaching the promised land of the bread department. 

Jai Gowkurian rides a forklift through the narrow aisles of the wine department, overseeing a reorganization of the shelves while his partner, Latif Ramanou, talks on the phone in booming West African French. Gowkurian wears the white dot, Ramanou the black.

Mahnaz Nassiri adds shredded carrots and raisins to the "Afghanistan rice" she makes for the cafeteria. Like so many employees at the market, Nassiri has, as she calls it, "a little bit of tragedy" in her past. After her father was killed by the Taliban secret police, she escaped across the border to Pakistan, where she lived for two years in a refugee camp. Now she lives in Clarkston with other family members who escaped Afghanistan, studies English at night, and delights restaurant customers with new flavors. She has adapted her mother's recipes to the needs of the market, to the ingredients at hand. She uses tortillas for Afghan flat bread, and, with egg roll wrappers, she can make a canny duplicate of the scallion dumplings called aushuk.

Everybody who works here has a past life. Joshi was a high school science teacher. Canaj a banker. Gowkurian an army officer in British Guyana, part of the division called to clean up after the Jonestown massacre. "That was a long time ago, " he says, not wanting to hesitate for an instant on the memory.

But they have one thing in common. They were all hired by Robert Blazer. 

"Robert has a big heart for immigrants, " says Canaj. "We start from zero here. We are like children. Robert has helped a lot of people who came here without anything."

Selling his dream

Robert Blazer had only a little retail experience before he went knocking on doors in his Decatur neighborhood in 1977, asking people if they'd like a farmers market. He had worked in his father's discount variety store in Pawtucket, R.I., and persuaded the old man to let him sell a few fruits and vegetables in the basement. While customers upstairs scrounged for cut-rate clothing and housewares, others downstairs rummaged through piles of seasonal corn. Connecting farmers with shoppers, Blazer felt, was his calling.

To the neighbors in Decatur, a fresh market sounded like a fine idea. Blazer opened with one load of fresh produce under a plastic roof in a former greenhouse. Without proper refrigeration on site, he couldn't keep a lone carrot fresh overnight. "The first day was a make-or-break day for me, " he recalls. The neighbors, true to their word, bought out the market.

When the market's roof collapsed in an ice storm two years later, Blazer didn't have insurance. So he again appealed to his neighbors. They exchanged checks for scrip –$100 here and there – and reclaimed their money in groceries after the market was rebuilt with a sound roof.

Blazer made as many improvements to the building as he could, adding air compressors and fans, a checkout annex and an expanded parking area. But he couldn't put proper drainage in the concrete floor; workers with squeegee mops had to pass continuously, as wet-footed shoppers stepped aside. And he couldn't conjure more space out of thin air. In 1986, much of metro Atlanta watched as Blazer cleared a tract of land in Scottdale and built the current location. 

And as he subtly shifted the market's focus from gourmet mecca for Atlanta's established middle class to international market, Blazer's credo as a greengrocer – representing the "people who are growing [produce] directly to the public" – became the cornerstone of his business model. By cutting out the middleman, he could keep prices low. His purchasing staff orders directly from nectarine growers in California, salmon farmers in Chile, artisanal food manufacturers in Italy.

Business was rocking after the market relocated, but Robert Blazer's personal life was starting to fray. His first marriage fell apart. His dealings with Harry were growing strained. And his father, with whom he had a number of unresolved conflicts, died. 

"I was failing in my relationships with people, " recalls Blazer, his eyes clouding with the memory of hitting bottom. "I realized that all of us were struggling, " he continues. "We had to learn to work well with people – at home and in the workplace. We had to create a future."

He was looking for answers. And he found some in the teachings of Werner Erhard, the controversial founder of est. 

Blazer became involved in the Forum, a motivational training seminar developed by Erhard, and encouraged his managers to follow suit. Many did, though some were reluctant. In late 1988, eight former employees of the market sued Blazer, claiming they were unfairly fired or forced to resign because they refused to adopt the tenets of the Forum. At the time Blazer refused to talk to the press, but his attorney claimed there was no coercion; a market spokesman called the allegations of religious brainwashing "ridiculous." The suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Blazer now says the Forum "had some good ideas" and that his only motivation in encouraging his supervisors to attend seminars was to help them. But he was bruised by the beating he took in the public eye and has been camera-shy ever since. 

Even after his own brother went into direct competition with the opening of the first Harry's, Robert Blazer feels he emerged from the Forum debacle not weaker, but stronger. His interest in group relationships had grown only more ideological and more personal.

In 1988 he wrote a credo, which he titled "The Stand." It greets customers from a plaque between the front doors:

We declare the world is designed to work.

We are responsible for what does not work.

We make the difference.

No matter how technologically advanced we become, we cannot escape our

fundamental relationships with food and each other. The possibility of these

relationships is the world market. In this context, the world works for everyone

free of scarcity and suffering.

We commit ourselves to the possibility this world market is for the future generations of this planet.

"The Stand" gave Blazer his first glimmer of the "world market" – not just a physical market with chickens and tomatoes, but a metaphorical market, a laboratory for bettering the human condition through food and commerce. 

The following year Blazer began to develop his personal management philosophy and his theories of expanding and contracting energies. He won't discuss the particulars, although he is working on a book that will spell it out. 

But he is certain his beliefs and practices – "the outcome of a certain way of seeing things" – allowed his market to thrive, while the absence of such beliefs sank Harry's.

"Harry was trying to prove he was better than us. To build a business, it has to be based in giving something to people. If you give to life, life gives back to you. When all you want is to get something, the positive energy is not present."

Blazer, 55, currently runs the market with his second wife, Barbara. He is still deeply involved in the produce arm of the business; Barbara's imprint can be seen in the cookbooks, dry goods and housewares, and she's had a hand in redecorating the cafeteria. His 18-year-old son, Daniel, a recent graduate of Woodward Academy, is deferring college for a year to learn the family business. 

Harry Blazer, who has relocated to Montana, refused comment for this story. Robert Blazer says the two see each other "once or twice a year."

A degree of liberty

Reti Canaj pulls a Pyrex plate out of the oven in her kitchen. Inside are lamb chuck steaks sizzling in their rendered fat. She puts the lamb on the stove and prepares a concoction that seems strange to non-Albanian eyes: yogurt, eggs, flour, oil, dill and parsley. She pours a good gallon of it over the lamb and returns the dish to the oven. 

The Canajs have owned their house in a Tucker subdivision for a year. It has a cathedral ceiling in the living room, arrangements of pastel silk flowers along the fireplace, and a portrait of the founder of the Albanian state hanging by the front door, Gjergj Kastrioti, also known as Skanderbeg. In 1443 Kastrioti raised Albania's double-headed eagle flag and proclaimed, "I have not brought you liberty, I found it here, among you."

The Canajs have found a certain degree of liberty in America. Their 9-year-old son, Gersi, can ride his bike safely on their dead-end street. Their daughter, Silva, is a brilliant student at Tucker High who has so far faced down only one B, in advanced placement chemistry.

Yet Ali Canaj, with his advanced degree in engineering, works nights at Pep Boys. Reti wishes they had the resources to visit her ailing mother in Albania or her sisters who relocated to Western Europe. 

As much as Reti Canaj, a passionate cook, appreciates the fresh foods she brings home from her workplace, she misses the personality of Albanian foodstuffs – the way the green beans filled her nose with a prickly, vegetal aroma when she snapped them, the darkness of the egg yolks, the lamb. 

"All the houses smell very good over there when people bake meat. That's because all the animals eat actual grass."

Nonetheless, her house in Tucker is smelling about as good as a house can. Reti removes the baked lamb dish, called Tave Kosi, from the oven. The yogurt-egg mixture has reduced to a thick, golden custard. 

She brings it to the table along with green beans she stewed with veal and tomatoes in her pressure cooker, the one she brought from Albania. She serves a vegetable soup that's bright and tangy with lemon and dill, and deep with the flavor of veal bones. 

After dinner, Canaj pulls out a bottle of Albanian brandy called konjak. It is decorated to look like a wooden log and features a portrait of Gjergj Kastrioti. And she pours shots in tiny crystal glasses. She often wishes she could return to Albania. She and her husband have striven so much to rebuild their lives. They often feel lost in America. It's all for the children, for their future.

"We have to work so hard to keep our family strong, " says Reti Canaj, sitting down for a moment, if not exactly relaxing. "But I think that people, if they work hard, then maybe they can find themselves."

Just like in India

Dinner at the Joshi/Patel household usually takes about an hour to prepare, and that is with the help of a squadron of pressure cookers to speed the process along. Every night they prepare a vegetable, papadum crisps, homemade flat breads, yogurt seasoned with spices fried in ghee (clarified butter), and either rice and the Indian lentils called dahl or khichadi, a soft mixture of rice and dahl cooked together.

Tonight they've make chapatis, a kind of flat bread that they roll and fold and roll and fold to give them a flaky texture. They cook the chapatis in a flat iron skillet called a tawa until they puff and blister. When the chapatis are all cooked, dinner's ready.

They sit around a small table set against their living room wall; it groans with the above dishes plus chutneys and pickles that emerge from Tupperware containers. They eat everything except the khichadi, which they save for the end, like dessert. 

When it is time, Rehka Patel fetches the pot of khichadi and the tin of ghee from the kitchen. She spoons out large steaming scoopfuls onto everyone's plate; it is lemon-yellow and fragrant with spice, and has a texture that's a bit like stiff grits. People help themselves to the firmly set ghee, which melts on top of the khichadi and sends buttery rivulets down the sides.

The table, which a minute earlier had been filled with animated laughter, falls silent as they all take their first bite. It is so good – the flavor of home.