I recently joined a CSA. I had been member of another CSA, but that one was based in the Bay Area (ie, San Francisco), so the produce was more than a little wilted by the time it got down to San Diego. The subscription farm that I just joined is totally local and, from what I've been told by a good friend, produces very good veggies.
Being a member of a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture), or subscription farm, means that by enabling a farm to pay its bills and workers, one gets the bounty of that which is produced - namely, fresh produce - for either the same monetary cost or even less than the supermarket (especially organic supermarkets like Whole Foods), because this process is direct. It cuts out the middle-man, the supermarket/distributer who, naturally, takes a cut (often a substantial one at that) from what the consumer pays before paying the farmer. By cutting out this middle-man, the farmer gets to keep more of what the consumer pays, and the consumer ends up paying less than retail for their food.
Naturally, there will be leaner times and more abundant times, when one's CSA box (or "share," as they are referred) contents can vary. That is the price of buying into a subscription farm: by sharing the expenses, the consumer gets a portion of that which is produced, for better, when times are abundant, or worse, when there are events that cause or precipitate crop failure. It's shared risk among the farmer and their customers. If there is more than one farm in a co-op arrangement, the other member farms may try to produce extra to make up for the farm that has had the bad luck, but I don't know that for sure. For each of the subscription farms I've known, and I'm only just joining my second, it is a single farm. I believe the CSA I've just joined is veggie-only, so, like I'd said in an earlier post, Kat and I will still need to go to Sprout's or North Park Produce to get most of our fresh (and dried) fruit.
I expect to make forays to places like Trader Joe's (although I am trying to limit my spending there for reasons which I'll go into later) or the Grocery Outlet for things like cooking oils, vinegars (since Kat and I have realized that it would take more space to properly ferment and store vinegar than we have in our small two-bedroom flat), dairy products (I have not the right mentality or constitution to go vegan at this point), and almond, rice, or the occasional coconut milk. I'd also end up buying herbs and spices, though if we find a good garden spot (ie, if Peter relocates to a place where we can grow an herb garden comparable to the one he currently has), we could conceivably grow much of the herbs we'd use. Then we'd just need to buy spices.
On the dairy note, I've tried to produce yogurt at home by using a "starter" of store-bought yogurt and store-bought milk that I've heated up to 115-120 degrees Fahrenheit. I was trying to wake up the yeast without killing it with too high a temperature, but the two times I've tried it, the yogurt came out very watery. It turned out that, counterintuitively, using more starter yogurt actually makes the yogurt form less well... That's an experiment that I'll need to try again another day this summer, as paying almost $10 per week for the eight pounds of yogurt we consume becomes expensive after a while. I'm glad that Kat likes yogurt. She tends to sweeten it with honey and/or jam (her current favorite is fig jam, which I buy at North Park Produce). Still, I'm glad she's found a good source of calcium, as she, like I, no longer drinks bovine milk due to lactose intolerance. In other words, she has started to suffer from the inability to produce lactase with which to digest lactose, producing rather pronounced gastric disturbances.
That leads me to another, almost-related point. Kat's dad, who lives on the East Coast, doesn't (or at least he didn't, when I knew him) believe there's such a thing as lactose intolerance. He also doesn't believe in earthshine, by which one can see, with the naked eye, that portion of the moon which is not directly lit by the sun (at night). It's a fortunate thing that Kat was conceived before I knew him well enough to know about these beliefs, or she would not be around at all. I don't think I would have willingly bred with a man whose mind, while claiming to espouse the reality of the scientific method, denies such things...
Back to the point with which I started today's discussion: fresh produce. It helps that the produce we will be consuming will be organically produced, meaning that no artificial growth stimulants are used and that no insecticides are applied. I understand that organic farms do not produce the volume of food that is required to feed the human population as it stands today. This, in turn, leads me to another point: the world's human population is quickly approaching the carrying capacity of the planet, if it's not already there. At some point, the human population will reach a point at which there will necessarily be a population crash. The estimates of the carrying capacity of our fair blue dot in this great universe keep going up, but there is a limit. Bullocks, say some, technology will allow the human population to increase infinitely. But what kind of quality of life would it be for that population? Not a very pretty one, if the current state of income distribution is any indication.
While I'm in favor of organic gardening and farming, I realize that there is a need, on another scale, to have adequate farms to feed the world's ever-increasing human population. For me, the locality of my produce is more important than the fact that it's organic, because I understand that organic produce contains no more nutrients than that which is conventionally-produced using pesticides and GMOs. That less fuel is used to bring the produce to me is the deciding factor. I like food with small ecological footprints.
That brings me to another rant: the human population. The growth of the human population is uneven in that the places that produce the most wealth and are best suited to support larger populations have steadily decreasing populations (with the notable exception of the United States, though much of our population growth is from immigration) while poorer, less technologically-advanced populations are indeed burgeoning, meaning to grow or increase rapidly. Hell in a handbasket, anyone?
But back to my produce. Today, I'm happily unpacking butter lettuce, cone-top cabbage, radishes, eight-ball summer squash, beets, kale, broccoli, fresh basil, and a pint of lovely, sweet, red strawberries. I was able to fill the drawers in my fridge and then some.
I'm only sorry that in today's Pastries and Desserts class, we made doughnuts, which Liz and I were happily devouring as they cooked. Ugh. Now I'm paying the price. Tomorrow, I will try to run, then, if my hip feels better. Then I'll get into my regular core routine, then perhaps add in some arms, shoulders, chest, and back for a whole-body workout. For now, I'm going to take a shower and lay myself down to rest after just waaay too many carbs in those doughnuts...
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