Community Supported Agriculture and Seasonal Eating

So, here's where I sheepishly admit that I messed up my dates, and our CSA doesn't actually start until June 17th. Whoops!

To tide you over, let's talk about CSAs and what they are. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and many people think that it is one of the best ways forward for our family farms and farmers. In a CSA, you essentially buy a share of a local farmer's crop in advance. The farmer uses that money to buy seed, farm equipment, whatever, and you get a weekly share of whatever is ripe at that farm during the growing season. The advantage to CSAs is that they are often less expensive than buying at farmers' markets, the produce generally travels less than 50 miles from farm to your fridge, and many CSA farmers use organic methods. As well, you're supporting local family farmers and helping them keep agricultural spaces in an increasingly suburban and urban world.

The primary disadvantage is that, like a garden, a CSA forces you to eat seasonally. Seasons are different all over the US, but here in Northern Virginia, for example, it means that our first CSA delivery is going to be primarily greens, broccoli, and some herbs. Tomatoes don't start until sometime in July, and the greens will close to being over by then, so salads will have to be more creative then lettuce and tomatoes. As a consumer culture, we've gotten used to being able to have whatever we want whenever we want it -- strawberries in February, tomatoes in April, lettuce in August. We find recipes and then shop to buy the ingredients. Eating seasonally means that we'll be getting our ingredients and then finding recipes to use them in. Joe and I are actually excited by this prospect! This is going to challenge our creativity as cooks in a way that we find enormously interesting. Joe, of course, is going to be taking point on a lot of the recipe creativity, but I'll be doing my part and documenting the whole thing.

Our CSA is Bull Run Mountain Farm

Beginnings

In a way, this all started with the book Fast Food Nation. My then boyfriend (now husband) and I read it, put down the Big Macs, and moved on with our lives. We were just learning to cook then, back in the Dark Ages of 2001, and it was our first wake-up call regarding where food comes from and how it gets to us. But it sparked an interest in both of us, and we started to pay more attention to what we were eating and where it came from. We started seeking out local restaurants over chains, started patronizing our local farmer's markets, and started a love affair with cooking from scratch, not boxes or bags. Fast-forward to 2009, when I was taking a course in business and technical writing. I needed to interview someone in a company I was interested in about what sort of writing was important to them. I had stumbled across a non-profit organization called Humane Farm Animal Care (HFAC) that was using a labelling program to allow consumers to know that the meat, milk, or eggs that they were consuming had been produced from animals that lived pretty good lives, and so I contacted them. The interview led to an summer writing internship, and that spark of interest in where my ingredients came from flamed up again.

We started seeking out free-range eggs and grass-fed beef and organic milk, but it soon became frustrating trying to navigate whether 'free-range' actually meant that the chickens had the meaningful opportunity to go outside and be chickens, or if it just meant that an industrial farm cut a 1'x1' hole in a barn wall that led to 5'x5' asphalt pad (for a flock of a thousand) so they could charge a premium for my soft-heartedness. As well, the tightening job market and soaring food prices meant that it was getting harder to pay those premiums when I didn't even know if we were actually doing any good. We threw up our hands, and went back to Costco (but we still kept buying those cage-free eggs because I'm a sucker like that).

Then I discovered the Hunter's Head Tavern. The restaurant is owned by Ayrshire Farm, a name I recognized from my stint at HFAC as one of the certified farms, and I told my husband that I wanted to drive out to Middleburg, VA and give it a try. We got into a discussion about factory farming, the cost of raising animals in an ethical and sustainable way, and $100+ turkeys (ouch!). I had been kicking around the idea of a blog for a while, and he suggested that we try a 'Middleburg Challenge' where we see if we could afford to/put up with the inconvenience of eating ethically according to our standards. And an idea for a blog was born.

We're starting easy -- the growing season is on us and our CSA makes its first delivery tomorrow, June 3rd. We'll be keeping to our rules until our CSA's delivery season comes to an end in October, and then re-evaluate from there. I'll be posting about our meals, our food sources, highlighting products and producers and what makes them acceptable, and of course, our garden. I hope you'll come with us as we discover the food we want -- if it's possible on a real-world budget to live on food we can live with.