I had several requests to write about CSA's, and since it's the right time of year to sign up for one, I decided I'd better write about them sooner rather than later.
But before I get into that... I want to dedicate this week to one of my favorite vegetarians, Marc Maron, who is back on Air America as of last Tuesday. Danny Fucking Goldberg doesn't make it easy to hear him though, so here's the scoop on how to listen. Go to the KTLK 1150 AM website and click to stream your funny. Maron is on every weeknight at 10pm PST (1am EST) - sort of. There's some horrible Clipper basketball bullshit that goes on the station right before Marc and they don't hesitate to run over by up to an hour. So you might have to wait until 11pm PST to get your funny, but you'll still get both hours. If you podcast or something like that, get more details from the kind folks over at Morning Seditionists or Maron's Blog.
Ok, now back to our regular programming, CSA's or Community Supported Agriculture. If you haven't heard of it before, do yourself a BIG favor and click for more.
If you're here for the recipes, they are at the bottom - or you can find my entire stash of them on my website,
Persistent Vegetarian State: Simple Vegetarian Recipes. And if you're new to reading this weekly diary series, it's not just for vegetarians - all are welcome.
I am going to start with a description of CSA's that I pinched from the Madison Area CSA Coalition because it's worded so beautifully.
What is Community Supported Agriculture?
CSA buys you more than just vegetables. CSA buys you an experience, and a true connection to the source of your food.
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a new approach to growing, selling, buying, and consuming food. While new in name, in many ways CSA harkens back to an earlier time, when people knew where their food came from, ate in harmony with their local seasons, and enjoyed a balanced and nutritional diet of basic, natural foods.
CSA is about community. It is about relationships - between farmers and consumer, between consumers and the land. Bridging the urban and the rural, the present and the future, CSA simplifies the relationship between people and the source of their food. Through CSA, a consumer buys directly from the farmer for a full growing season. The produce harvested goes directly to the CSA members each week.
Besides great produce, CSA farms provide the focal point for education and community building. Field days, work days, harvest festivals and celebrations provide the opportunity for urban families to share and learn together in a rural setting. Children have a very special place on the CSA farm. Many farms offer activities organized especially for their young members. It's never too early to begin a connection to land, food and farming, teaching our children how and where our food is grown.
How did Community Supported Agriculture get started?
Community supported agriculture began in the early 1960's in Germany, Switzerland, and Japan as a response to concerns about food safety and the urbanization of agricultural land. Groups of consumers and farmers in Europe formed cooperative partnerships to fund farming and pay the full costs of ecologically sound, socially equitable agriculture.
Here are the specifics on how it works:
CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Joining a CSA is a great way to make a connection between yourself and the production of your food. You can build a relationship with the farmers who grow your food and learn more about what you eat. This is the antithesis of the system you read about in Fast Food Nation.
A CSA member buys a share of produce (one share feeds a family of four - you can buy a half or partial share if you don't have four people). The farm divides its operating costs among all shareholders and that is the annual cost.
Typically you have to sign up during the winter or early spring and pay upfront so the farmers can plan appropriately. This way, farms have the capital when they need it to buy seeds and equipment. Many farms accept foodstamps or labor in exchange for your food.
Once you've chosen a farm and signed up, you receive a big bag of farm fresh goodies every week or every other week - either in centrally located drop off points or at the farm itself. If you think this sounds like a good idea, use this website to find a CSA (in the US).
My CSA
While that is a generalized description of what you might find at a CSA, here is a description of the one I chose to provide another level of detail.
In Madison, there is an upcoming open house of all local CSA's at the botanical gardens. You can go there and meet the farmers and decide which one you want to sign up for.
I signed up already because the farm I liked best gave a discount for signing up before March 1. I chose an organic farm called Harmony Valley. I chose them because they do their pickups on Saturdays so I can get my box at the Farmer's Market on the Capitol Square during my regular trips there. Since I live alone, I signed up for a partial share with my friend/neighbor/Farmer's Market buddy, Jonny.
Harmony Valley offers several different packages. There's the normal share, which feeds a family of four, a partial share, which gives you a box every other week instead of every week, a salad share (salad only), a fruit program (fruit only), a flower program (fresh cut organic flowers every week), an extended season package (which gives you produce well into January), a flexible program (you pick which weeks you want to get a box), and even some meat (probably grass fed beef or free range chicken or something, but I didn't really look into it).
They also offer several payment packages. I just paid upfront (it was $190 apiece for Jonny and me to get our partial share) but they also accept food stamps or half now/half later payments or automatic monthly debits or a delayed payment plan where you make your first payment in April.
Once my CSA starts up, I envision it being like that classic I Love Lucy scene where Lucy and Ethel are trying to eat the chocolates as they come through the assembly line - except with vegetables. A local health insurance group apparently feels the same way, because they are giving their patients discounts if they sign up for a CSA.
Since the produce boxes are going to include vegetables I have never seen or eaten before (what's kohlrabi?), they include recipes in your boxes. Also, I bought a cookbook that is published by MACSAC, full of recipes for every single veggie grown around here.
Garbage IN
An article about CSA's that ran in the Sustainable Times (a local free publication) said that food is not "garbage in, garbage out" - it's just "garbage IN" because it doesn't come out (another way to say "you are what you eat"). The gist of the article was that people today don't really care about who makes their food, but it should be of utmost importance to us. It reminded me of the line in the movie Clueless where Alicia Silverstone (a vegan, by the way) is talking about being picky about who she sleeps with, and she says "I care about my shoes, and they only go on my foot!"
I care about my shoes too. Probably everyone does. You don't go using the dorm room showers with bare feet because you're afraid of what the heck you might catch, so you wear shower shoes. And you wouldn't just wear any old pair of shoes you found on the street or in the lost and found. I wouldn't even be thrilled about the idea of sharing shoes with a friend. Your food goes IN you. Why should we care more about what we put on our feet than what we put in us? Probably because shoes don't have quite the lobbying power or the advertising power or the laboratory engineered taste and smell that so much of our food has.
(Just a side note about that last comment - there's a great chapter in Fast Food Nation about how they engineer hamburger flavor, fry flavor, all sorts of flavors in laboratories. The author notes that it takes an extremely small amount of natural or artificial flavoring to do the job. He also said that there isn't that much difference between "natural" and "artificial" flavoring in terms of one being more natural or better for you.)
So back to the topic at hand.
Last week there were MANY comments that the idea of a "free range chicken" is basically a scam. If you eat chicken, and if your CSA sells chicken, you can go there and see how the chickens live. If your CSA has days where you can go work, you can see what the process of harvesting your food is really like (you can also do this if there is a Pick Your Own program on local farms, even if you don't sign up for a CSA). With a CSA, you can talk to the farmer directly and you can ensure that you aren't going to put garbage in.
I see joining a CSA as the ultimate liberal way to get my food. When you buy from a CSA, all of your money goes to the farmers; when you buy from the store, only some of the money goes to the farmers - the rest pays for things like distribution costs. I invest in my community, pay farmers a fair wage, eat locally and seasonally (which saves gas), and buy organic (I chose an organic farm for my CSA) so I am not polluting the environment, harming the workers' health, or ingesting the poison that gets sprayed all over conventionally grown foods. It's also a way to forcefeed myself a balanced diet of veggies that I might not otherwise buy.
Recipes
This time of year is excrutiating in terms of food seasons, weather, and just getting winter the hell over with in general. Beans and grains are always available, citrus is in season (but not locally grown if you live somewhere freezing cold like Wisconsin), and I'm not really sure what else but I've been on a sweet potato kick lately. So here's a few good ones.
Crock Pot Bean and Barley Chili
Prep time: 20 min; Total time: 2 days
Ingredients
- 1 onion, chopped
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 1/2 c. beans, dried (or 2 cans)
- 28 oz. tomatoes, diced
- 1 c. barley, hulled or pearled
- 3 c. water
- 2-3 tbsp. chili powder
- 1 tbsp. cumin
- 1 green chili, diced (optional)
- 1 tsp. coriander (optional)
- 1 tsp. unsweetened Fair Trade organic cocoa powder (optional)
- Cayenne, to taste (optional)
- Salt, to taste
- Fresh ground pepper, to taste
- Grated cheddar or pepper jack cheese (optional)
Start the night before you want to eat by boiling a cup and a half of dried kidney beans in water for 5 minutes. Drain the water. Soak the kidney beans in water overnight, discarding the soak water once during that time and again when you finish soaking.
(If you are using canned beans, just start the morning of the day you want to eat chili and drain and rinse your beans.)
The morning of the day you want chili for dinner, combine all ingredients except for salt, pepper, and cheese in a crock pot. Set the crock pot on low and cook for at least 7 hours. When you get back, taste your chili and adjust spices, salt, and pepper as necessary.
Serve with grated cheese.
(I didn't make this very hot because you can always add spice but you can't take it out. If you like it hot, you know what to do.)
Sweet Potatoes with Apricots and Walnuts
(my family has this one on Thanksgiving but there's no reason why you can't have it all the time)
Prep time: 15 min; Total time: 40 min
Ingredients
- 3 sweet potatoes
- 1 15 oz. can apricots in pear juice (or in syrup)
- 1/3 c. maple syrup, Grade B (or 1/2 c. brown sugar)
- 1 tsp. arrowroot powder (or 1 tbsp. corn starch)
- Pinch salt
- Dash cinnamon
- 1 tsp. orange zest
- 1/2 c. walnuts
Wrap sweet potatoes in a dish towel and microwave them for 10 minutes. Remove them from the microwave and let them sit until you can touch them. Peel them, cut them in quarters, and place them in a 13x9x2 pan.
Partially open the can of apricots and pour the juice or syrup into a small bowl. Add maple syrup, salt, cinnamon, arrowroot powder or cornstarch, and orange zest. Mix all ingredients together.
Place apricots in the pan with the sweet potatoes. Add walnuts, and pour your maple syrup mixture over it. Bake at 375 F for 25 minutes.