By Neil Offen
noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646
DURHAM -- In the faux gothic shadow of Duke Medicine's Bryan Research Building, you can find glistening spring onions and luscious, plump beefsteak tomatoes.
This Friday mid-day, there's aromatic beige cantaloupe and no-sugar-added fig preserves, strawberry bread, bags of basil and ears of corn.
It's a sprout of green tucked in among the concrete sea of a small triangle formed by the Bryan, Nanaline Duke and Mudd buildings. It's the Duke Farmers Market, and it's celebrating its 10-year anniversary.
The market -- primarily for Duke medicine employees, but also open to students and hospital and campus visitors -- was the nation's first farmers market at a hospital, and a model for a series of them now open at medical centers across the country.
"We get calls all the time from other centers, wanting to know how we do it," said Diana Monroe, the coordinator of the market and a staff member of Duke's Live for Life employee health promotion program.
Held every Friday from April through the end of July and then every other week through mid-September, the market is a function of the Live for Life program, designed to help employees lead healthier lives. It was started, Monroe said, "because a survey of Duke employees showed that they were not consuming enough fruits and vegetables. There weren't that many markets back then and we wanted to encourage healthy eating and make it convenient for our employees."
It's grown enormously from those small beginnings. Around 500 employees attend each week, and over the course of the summer, about 4,000 employees visit at least once.
For many Duke employees, it's become a regular Friday stop.
"I'm here every week, absolutely every week," said Eric Lipp, a clinical research coordinator in surgery-neuro oncology. "This is so convenient. I love being able to just walk out of my office and pick up zucchini and squash for dinner. We're going to be grilling them. My family has waited all winter for the zucchini. They are so much better than what you find in the supermarket."
For pharmacist Christina Teeter, the market is "a nice kickoff to the weekend. It makes it feel like the weekend. It's so nice to be outside and surrounded by all this wonderful stuff."
Hospital staffers, many of them in white lab coats or blue scrubs and hair nets, line up to buy the zucchini for tonight's meal or lunch for today; several lunch vendors are at the market, including Cosmic Cantina, Jason's Deli and Muddy Dog Provisions.
Or they can just eat some samples, like toasted barley with grilled sweet potatoes or lavender and herb-grilled chicken, available this day from Duke University dining service chefs. There's music, too, supplied today by a young violinist.
"The market has grown beyond just a nutrition program," Monroe said. "It's a festive occasion. We tie it in to all our other Live for Life programs, and they all really work well together."
And for many, it's a social occasion as well.
Tom Hurtgen, of Hurtgen Meadows Farm, one of the 12 fruit and vegetable vendors at the market, worked at Duke for more than 28 years. Now he's selling cabbage, onions and broccoli to his former colleagues.
"It's so much fun to run into people I used to work with," Hurtgen said. "It's a really nice market."
If you go
The Duke Farmers Market is held weekly through the end of July, then Aug. 12 and 27 and Sept. 10. It’s open from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The market is between Duke Medicine’s Bryan Research Building and Nanaline Duke Building, by the Searle Center and near Duke Hospital.
For more information and for a list of market events this summer, visit www.hr.duke.edu/farmersmarket.
