On Martha’s Vineyard, Using Scallops as Currency
By JOAN NATHAN
Published: January 23, 2008
FOR year-round residents of this Martha’s Vineyard village, winter is time to relax. In summer, when the island’s population soars from 15,000 to 75,000, locals like Jan Buhrman have to make a year’s living in just a few short months. Ms. Buhrman, who is 50, caters weddings and dinner parties for the seasonal crowd. When winter comes, she tends a local school library, among other jobs, and she cooks.
Even in January, her hours in the kitchen have a purpose. Sitting in the bright oak post-and-beam room built by her husband, Richard Osnoss, a carpenter, Ms. Buhrman explained that she tries to eat only food raised on Martha’s Vineyard and to go down island to the grocery store in Vineyard Haven as little as possible.

Some of her groceries she grows herself. For much of the rest, she trades with her neighbors.

Following Ms. Buhrman for a day or two as she gathers ingredients is a lesson in how to eat locally, even in the coldest days of winter. Because she seems to know everybody on the island who raises, catches or forages for food, it is also a glimpse of an alternative economy of eating, one in which modern capitalism takes a back seat to a looser, island-grown style of bartering.

In summer, for instance, Ms. Buhrman hands out ice from her freezers to help the local fishermen keep their catch cold. In winter, they repay her with fish, oysters and bay scallops.

“It’s just the way we do it here,” she said.

“Swapping and borrowing isn’t institutionalized on the Vineyard,” said Carl Flanders, a fisherman in summer and a carpenter in winter. “If I catch some fish in summer, I’ll sell it to Larsen’s Fish Market but I’ll just give the rest away to friends. I don’t expect anything in return.”

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