An interesting article from Just Food:
CSA can be an amazing, delicious, incredibly rewarding thing to participate in. Sometimes your bumper crop of peaches and flavorful garlic are the envy of all your Food Town-shopping friends. But then there are those days. Those days when you pick up an overwhelming of amount of a vegetable you hate for the third time in as many weeks. When you have to volunteer at an outdoor distribution in the cold, pouring rain and shiver your way through your shift. Or those SEASONS when tomato blight strikes, or you find yourself picking up bok choy perforated by hail stones, and you still have to pay the full amount for the season.
It’s at times like those that we like to remind ourselves why we’re willing – happy, even – to take the bad along with all the good. Here are a few great quotes about what it is you’re supporting when you put down your deposit on your CSA share:
“An organic farm, properly speaking, is not one that uses certain methods and substances and avoids others; it is a farm whose structure is formed in imitation of the structure of a natural system that has the integrity, the independence and the benign dependence of an organism”
– Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land”
“A farm includes the passion of the farmer’s heart, the interest of the farm’s customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air about the farm — it’s everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape. A farm is virtually a living organism. The tragedy of our time is that cultural philosophies and market realities are squeezing life’s vitality out of most farms. And that is why the average farmer is now 60 years old. Serfdom just doesn’t attract the best and brightest.”
–Joel Salatin,“Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal“
And a note on what we, as CSA members, can get out of our shares:
“During the week as I prepared meals, I noticed a different feeling, a change in perspective. I found myself preparing the vegetables in a loving, respectful manner. I planned with a passion so nothing would go to waste. I began to compost. When, for the first time, I ate what I had harvested, it was both an awakening and yet a deepening of the mystery. I clearly understood how this food was becoming a very part of me; its life had been sacrificed that mine could continue and this was all right… I understood that the Earth was alive and that it gave and sustained other life… Food would never be the same for me again.”
– CSA Member Pat Mannix quoted in Elizabeth Henderson’s “Sharing the Harvest” about how she felt after spending a day working at her CSA farm.
farmspot 