Excellence made into an organic market

PalmI remember the beginnings of the organic market in Plaça de los Patins in Palma as if it were yesterday. In the days leading up to it, some neighbors from the neighborhood where I lived at the time, Puerta de Santa Catalina, offered their skeptical predictions: "That won't do well, organic products are expensive." Those conversations are so typical of humans, and especially of islanders, who predict the failure of anything we don't understand or that doesn't quite fit with our understanding.

In the first few weeks, the convinced among us lined up, while other curious onlookers milled around, comparing prices. A neighbor from Oms Street heard me preaching the virtues of eating things grown without fertilizers or other artificial pests, grown in a healthy way, and she admitted, "I only know one thing, and that's that I made some boiled vegetables, and the cabbage had that strong smell I hadn't experienced in ages. I feel like I was young again."

Fifteen years later, the organic market is a reality because it has proven that projects work if they are capable of something as simple and as difficult as doing things right. Offering quality, maintaining it, and being competitive is the only way for agriculture and the rest of the island's productive sectors to survive. To think that simply by "being from here," or by having a base of unconditional supporters, the future is guaranteed is, at best, naive.

And we can apply this to most projects, initiatives, and even sectors. Only the aspiration for excellence, instead of just being the best, will give us a solid industry, cultural enterprises with a future, and independent media outlets like ours. And you'll tell me that it's also necessary for institutions to believe in and invest in this. Yes, but that alone won't get us anywhere.