man & nature # 166 ~ goods eats
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 08:12AM 
Food from the farm • click to embiggenThanks to the wife we are now eating very tasty food. She got us hooked up to a farm fresh stuff of the week program whereby every week we get a box of just-harvested veggies, fruit, and a loaf of fresh baked bread (a fresh chicken is a $10 option) from a local farm.
Aside from the significant difference in taste between just harvested and store bought stuff, what I like most is a re-connection to the seasons. We eat what the season and the earth provide as the season dictates. I have long felt that the "magic" of the natural world is somehow compromised by, as just one example, eating strawberries from who-knows-where in mid-December.
As I mentioned previously, most of our beef and some pork comes from a farm just up the hill above town where they raise Scottish Highland Cattle. Once again, the taste of this beef is quite a bit different from the store-bought variety.
The other significant satisfaction that comes from all of this is that of buying local. It just feels good to spend your money with a neighbor rather than some faceless too-big-to-fail agri-biz.
Reader Comments (2)
Rediscovering what real food taste like is a joyful experience.
A local supermarket now has three kinds of apples: red, green and yellow and are labeled as such. Jeez. Same kind of labelling for potatoes. Standardization. Food tasting the same all over North America. What a frightful perspective.
Large tasteless California strawberries in the dead of winter; flavorless corn on the cob at the beginning of spring. Cardboard tasting breakfast cereals whose first ingredient is sugar. Packaged cookies so full of preservatives, they can last for years on market shelves.
But, small open air produce markets are making a come back locally. Thank God. Plus there's a local organization called "Friends of the Earth" comprising of 34 local producers offering some 1100 different products.
The changes that need to be made to our world are massive. This is one way we can begin at home.
We too have been involved for a few years now with a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm. Subscribers ante up some currency early in the year in order for the farm to have some capital, and then get a box of food every week during the growing season, which around here is April - September. Also included with the weekly food is an emailed newsletter with a cost breakdown of the food included for the week, and recipe suggestions. You can see some of what's going on here.