Me, My Food, and My Farm

On Community Supported Agriculture

By Dayna Macy
[Yoga Journal, May 2006]

I. Turnips

It's Friday, farm box day in my house. I grab my box of fresh produce from a local pick up place and open it. Broccoli Rabe--hallelujah! Blue Kuri squash--beautiful! Tomatoes--excellent! Onions--useful! Turnips! Uh turnips?

As a member of Full Belly Farm, a community supported agriculture (CSA) farm located in the Capay Valley, about 100 miles from my home in Berkeley, California, I'm often cooking something I've never seen at a store or at least never thought to buy. I give Full Belly $15 a week and in return, receive a box of wildly fresh fruits and vegetables--of the farmer's choosing. I hope for what I love: stone fruit, chard, or corn, depending on the season. What I don't love--parsnips, rutabagas, and the like--well, I hope the crops won't be too bountiful.

Try as I might to be open minded, I think of turnips as a subsistence crop, a tuber whose main culinary claim to fame is that they were once eaten to prevent scurvy. But never mind. Turnips is what I've got, turnips is what I'll eat. I plow through my cookbooks and find a decent sounding soup recipe. I'm betting that the ingredients, which include butter, onions, celery, apples, and curry powder, could transform even a turnip into something edible. They do. The soup turns out to be pretty tasty, and as an added bonus, I don't have to worry about scurvy anymore.

"When you get a CSA box, you have to figure out what to do," says Judith Redmond, one of Full Belly's four owners. "For people willing to discover and figure out what to do, it's an exciting and creative process."

Indeed. For me, the unanticipated gift of a CSA box is that food is no longer a commodity, but a challenge to interact with intelligently and creatively. Ratatouille in winter? I don't think so! Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are summer crops. You cook with what grows in this place and time. Your box gave you turnips? Go figure it out.

II -- Local Motion

When I first heard about weekly veggie boxes, I thought the idea sounded cool. I figured I'd be supporting a small farm (a good cause if I've ever heard of one), I would learn what grows nearby, and I'd be introduced to stuff I wouldn't normally buy. I didn't know then what a profound departure it would be from what has become standard practice in our food supply.

On average, a tomato travels 1500 miles before it lands in your grocery cart. It's probably a hybrid that was bred to survive the trip rather than to taste great, and it may have been picked before its prime, in order to last days if not weeks before you chose it for dinner. It used up plenty of the earth's resources being packaged, refrigerated, and trucked from farm to distribution point to store. Poor tomato. Poor you.

Those turnips in my box traveled just 100 miles (about the limit for most CSA farm produce), and were an heirloom variety chosen for outstanding flavor. They were harvested about 24 hours before I ate them; plus their arrival at my house put money in the hands of a local farmer, who, by cutting out middlemen and limiting transportation costs, might just stay in business. (In the standard corporate agriculture model, farmers typically receive 10 cents or less for every dollar a consumer spends on food. For a CSA, that number is close to 100 percent.) On top of all that, those turnips prompted me to rethink dinner!

I didn't ask for all of this when I committed to the weekly deliveries, but I'm grateful to have found it. As the poet farmer Wendell Berry so famously wrote, "eating is an agricultural act... Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture."

Eating locally--which you can also do by frequenting farmers' markets or grocery stores that carry locally grown produce--does a lot more than save gas: it improves your nutrition. The shorter the time and distance between the farm and your tummy, the fewer nutrients your food loses; and the more variety in your diet, the broader the range of nutrients you get.

Supporting local farmers protects genetic diversity and food security. Corporate farms (even of the organic persuasion) generally grow dozens or even hundreds of acres of a single crop, and only plant produce that has a wide demand. In effect, distributors decide what farmers grow--and that means only a few rugged varieties of the most common fruits and vegetables are planted in any given year. CSAs, though, have a captive audience and can take more chances growing unusual crops and heirloom produce. One farm might plant crops like kohlrabi and purple broccoli, or might cultivate a dozen varieties of tomatoes over the season, and none of them would be the standard types you find at the supermarket. This means both the farmer and the consumer get to try different varieties, which is good for both culinary creativity and biological diversity.

"We grow only heirlooms," says Julia Wiley, co-owner of Mariquita Farm, a CSA in Watsonville, California. "The varieties are older and more interesting. And it keeps these heirlooms alive." But Wiley saves her most unusual produce like nettles, lambs quarters, escarole and purslane, for the famed Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market in San Francisco. (Some of her CSA clientele are less enamored of odd produce then the more adventurous palates she finds in the city.) This balance between her CSA and selling at the farmers' market, she says, works well, and everyone wins. She gets to grow diverse crops, which keeps heirlooms and biodiversity alive, and consumers get to experiment and eat a wide array of produce.

Eating only locally grown food can be a challenge, but Jessica Prentice, author of Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection (Chelsea Green), literally turned it into one. Last summer she posted a challenge on her Locavores.com Web site, asking people to commit to eating only locally grown food for a month as a way to get to know their "foodshed." Some 400 people agreed and spent August experimenting with local food.

Prentice found the experiment a huge success. "People learned to pay more attention to what grows here," she says. "When I did the challenge, I found that most of the foods that were bad for me left my diet. I stopped eating sugar but ate raw honey. I stopped drinking caffeine (coffee doesn't grow in the Bay Area) but replaced it with medicinal teas." The point of the challenge, she said, was not to ostracize foods that come from far away (where would be without cumin or coconut milk!), but to raise support for locally grown food.

Prentice counts as her biggest success hooking up local baker Eduardo Morell, who sells his artisan breads at the Berkeley Farmers' Market, with Full Belly Farm, which grows wheat. After some experimenting, he created a bread that he felt was good enough to sell. The local loaf was a huge success, continually selling out quickly. Morrell's local bread is just one example of how demand can create supply--if you want to eat locally grown bread, you can find someone to make it, thereby creating a new market where none existed before.

But there's another benefit to eating locally. When we eat food that's grown near us, by people who live near us, we eat according to the rhythms of nature. In a culture that has become profoundly removed from food production and seasonal cycles, and disdains limitations of any kind, eating locally is not only an agricultural act, but a radical one.

"It's very alienating not to have connection to where food comes from," says Prentice. "When you eat food grown locally, it brings alive your connection to your place, to the people who grew it, to the seasons and to the cycles of life. Our culture is profoundly disconnected from the earth, but when we eat locally, we realize just how interconnected we really are."

III -- Me, my food, and my farm

I know what she means. I recently took my family for our first visit to Full Belly.

We parked the car and were immediately greeted by a full dog escort. Stuart and Nelly jumped up to welcome us. Fern sniffed us curiously, but Mister, the irrepressible golden retriever, ignored us while he chomped on some black walnuts that had fallen to the ground--no easy task, as walnut shells are about as hard as rocks.

Judith showed us the fields of autumn greens (it was October)-kale, chard, mustard and bok choy. She showed us the peach trees, the watermelon patch, and the pomegranate trees. We saw ornamental sunflowers and flowering amaranth. We marveled at the pumpkin patch, and my children were overjoyed when she handed them two giant carving pumpkins. We met the farm pig, Cinco, whose enormous girth and lusty grunts delighted my boys endlessly.

I fell in love. I felt deeply connected to the farm, and grateful to all the farm workers who've worked so hard to provide gorgeous produce to my family year after year. As we drove out, I felt like I left a part of my heart behind.

Luckily, though, I never have to fully leave the farm. There's always Fridays and my weekly box. Just yesterday I picked one up. Melon! The last of the tomatoes! An insanely buoyant crop of mustard greens!

Uh oh -- rutabagas.