Okay, hate is much too strong a word, but as wonderful as my CSA (community-supported agriculture) share has been this year, I do have some frustrations. First, let me expound upon the many ways I love my CSA:
1) I am happy to be helping local farmers.
2) The vegetables are fresh—many are picked the morning of delivery—and in season, which means they taste really yummy.
3) My produce, while not certified organic, is grown using sustainable methods, and the farm is committed to not using chemical pesticides whenever possible. That makes it more expensive, but it’s still cheaper than the equivalent quantity of organic produce from the grocery store or Whole Foods.
4) Our weekly share contains numerous, varied vegetables that we have already paid for. Therefore, we are quite motivated to eat them before they go bad. This has definitely helped us toward our goal of eating 5 to 9 servings of fruits and vegetables a day.
5) We’ve been exposed to some vegetables that I wouldn’t normally try (husk cherries, romanesco, pea tendrils, garlic scapes) or don’t frequently buy because I wasn’t sure how to use them (arugula, swiss chard, beet greens). So the CSA has expanded our palates, and our recipe repertoire.
Now, for the frustrations:
1) We get a lot of vegetables for two people. This means I have to be really creative about the meals I make so that they encompass multiple varieties. While this definitely helps with #4 above, it also means that if we want to have just grilled corn one night, that puts more pressure on the remaining meals of the week to incorporate, say, three vegetables instead of two. That gets tricky. It promotes creativity, yes, but it also means that planning our meals takes longer than it used to.
2) The other difficult part about meal planning is figuring out how to use the most perishable items first.
3) After seven weeks in a row of getting three or four of each in our share, I’d be fine if I never ate another cucumber or zucchini.
It has been a wonderful experiment, and I’m so glad that we did it—and that Farmer Dave’s has a pickup location in our town, which makes this possible. And I’d definitely recommend CSA participation to others. That said, if we sign up for it again next year I think we will try to split a share with another family. That will take some creativity too, but it should alleviate most of the frustrations. In the meantime, if anyone has any good CSA-friendly recipes, please share!
Leave a Reply