Healthy eating is an integral part of a healthy lifestyle.
The food you put into your body affects how you feel and how much energy you have for your daily tasks. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure are all conditions that can be improved—and sometimes reversed—by a change in lifestyle. Consistent exercise and lots of fresh vegetables go a long way to supporting a healthy body.
The farmers' market is a great place to get those vegetables. Produce purchased at a farmers' market is going to be fresher and tastier than the grocery store fare. Vegetables on store shelves arrived  from places as far away as California, Mexico, China, and Guatemala. That produce is not fresh.
The evidence ranges from goopy greens to shriveled garlic. When you buy greens, garlic, tomatoes, or beans from the farmers market, you're within a morning's drive of the dirt that produce grew in.
At a grocery store, your food dollars pay the delivery drivers, the store's utility company, a distribution company, and the owner of the land the food was grown on. The people who receive as little as a few cents from every dollar are the people who actually worked the land and harvested your food.
In this country and abroad, agricultural workers are subjected to conditions only marginally above slavery and paid a pittance for labor. When you spend your food dollars at the farmers' market, the entire dollar is going to the person who grew that food. And that person lives in your community.
You can also ask that person how their produce was grown. Growers at the market eat the food they sell, which means it is not ritually bathed in a cocktail of pesticides and herbicides.
Exposure to chemical residues on our food has been increasing radically over the last several decades. Other countries do not necessarily share our production regulations, so it is nearly impossible to know what kinds of chemicals foreign-grown produce has been exposed to.
At the farmers' market, the interaction between eater and grower cultivates a unique, reciprocal relationship. Perhaps the farmer will introduce you to a new favorite food, like eggplant or scallop squash. Or maybe you'll ask about a tomato variety new to the grower, which he or she will try the next season.
Whereas you, an individual, are utterly meaningless to a huge corporation, like a national chain grocery store, you, the individual who loves red peppers and visits their table every week, are unique  and vital to a farmer's financial future. That kind of direct accountability and real connection is absent in this anonymous, fast-paced global marketplace, where you are a disposable consumer consuming a disposable mass-produced product.
Learning to shop smart at the farmers' market can help you save money. While the early birds get the warm fried pies and first pick of produce, the late-comers can pick up some discounts. Produce that has gotten bruised or didn't sell often gets discarded at the end of the market.
Hang around until the vendors start to pack up and ask if there's a discount for these “seconds”. Just cut out the bad parts and use the good parts fresh or freeze right away.
Don't expect to buy the season's first squash and tomatoes at a bargain price. Especially early in the season, those plants have been babied and fussed over for weeks before ever producing the first harvest. Generally farmers don't expect to become millionaires by selling vegetables, but they don't want to work for free, either. It takes hard work and dedication to grow that food and get it to the market. Even farmers deserve to be paid for their effort.
However, a time will (usually) come when there are too many tomatoes and cucumbers for anyone to know what to do with. That is the time you can often get a discount for buying in bulk for putting up. Freezing, drying, and canning are great ways to make the money you spend at the farmers market feed your family through the winter.
The DeKalb Farmers' Market won't have fresh produce until mid-May, so you have plenty of time to find good recipes and brush up on your food preservation skills.
Rest assured, your local growers are already hard at work sowing seeds, planting potatoes, and nurturing tiny tomato plants.