I have been one of the slowest to come around to buying local, organic food. On the contrary, I tend to eat whatever produce is on sale. Avocados are two for a dollar? Then it’s guacamole for a week. Fuji apples are less than a dollar a pound? Then it’s apples in every meal. Bruised bananas for half the price? Yes! Smoothies for a month. I never buy anything without checking the price, and I rarely buy something when it’s not on sale.
Buying organic has always seemed to me like a bank-breaker. I love nature. I love animals. I want our world to last. But gosh dangit – a pint of organic cherry tomatoes for five bucks?
I know better. I’ve watched umpteen nutrition and sustainable farming documentaries. I know about the run-off from industrial farms, the pesticides, the herbicides, the erosion, the toxicity, the cancer, the wasted food in order to sell only the pretties, and on and on and on. But dag nabbit – organic grapes that cost more than dinner at a restaurant??
I’ve gotten way too accustomed to a cornucopia of inexpensive produce that has come from all over the world and from every season happening in those places.
Well, I don’t know what finally came over me. All I know is that one night, while everyone was snugly snoozing in their beds and I was gazing into the glow of my screen in our dark bedroom, I decided, ‘Enough!’ I went to the website of one of our local farms, I perused the CSA plans they offered, and signed us up for the year. I basically locked us into doing what’s right instead of continuing to do what’s easier on my wallet.
It’s just so darn easy to deny that all that beautiful conventional produce is filled with a not-so-pretty history when you’re face-to-face with unseasonably plump strawberries for a dollar a bushel and perfect little yellow potatoes that are a penny apiece. By buying it all along, I’ve basically been training my palate to expect whatever my taste buds are wanting, and I’ve been voting with my money to continue lots of unsustainable and unhealthy practices in order to have the world’s foods at my beck and call.
Now I’m locked into non-GMO, pesticide-free, local, untrucked, fresh, unadulterated, happy produce from happy farms, by farmers who are probably barely getting by in order to provide us with produce done right because they understand the urgency of all of this way more than I do.
I figured I was in for a shock – surely I’d be out of credit within a week’s time, with only a baggie full of fingerlings to show for it. Well, well, well…have I been pleasantly surprised. I showed up to my farmer’s stand, which is open all day long on the honor system while he and others are out working the fields. I gravitated immediately to the container of bruised tomatoes for $2 per pound because they were cheaper than the $3-per-pound beauties. The farmer happened to stop in for a minute and said, “Hey, why don’t we say all the tomatoes are $1 a pound. They won’t be here much longer and they’ll be on their way out if they don’t sell fast.” WHAT??! Heirlooms and organics at the store are $4 to $6 per pound right now! Wow, you shoulda seen how many bags of beautiful, flavorful, organic tomatoes I came home with that afternoon. We ate tomato everything for a few weeks. I never usually buy tomatoes at the store since they’re an overpriced, freakish version of the real thing – all that early picking, irradiation, and thousand-mile-trucking means they don’t taste like tomatoes from a garden anymore. WHAT A BOON! Now we were absolutely mowing fresh, amazing, just-picked tomatoes at every meal just to make sure not one would go bad.
The whole cheap organic tomato thing wasn’t an isolated incident. CSA aside, I was at our local Farmers’ Market last Saturday and one of the farmers was bursting with beautiful orange and red peppers in every shape and hue. I asked how much they were and she said, “Well, they’re not going fast today and I have a lot that I need to sell. How about $2 a pound?” Feeling the weight of one in my hand – which was almost nothing – I loaded two bags to the top and paid $7 for what would have cost me an arm and a leg for the same amount in a store.
Since switching to local organic, I’ve been enjoying the challenge of bringing home veggies that are available here in this season rather than buying what looks good from Mexico, Hawaii, and Peru. I’m not militant. I just bought Cuties (mandarins) that originated from some great distance away because they were cheap. But I’m opening to the idea of including many more leeks, parsnips, and beets in my life, even though they haven’t tended to call to me in the past. I have a sneaking suspicion that there’s something really beneficial about eating local foods in their seasons. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they contain all the things our bodies need to combat the very ailments that are common in our local environments (molds, allergens, bacteria, dark skies and low Vitamin D, etc.).
If you’d like to join the local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), go to John Steward’s Maple Rock Farm website. In a nutshell, you decide how much money you want to send to him through the aether, then you have a credit for whenever you want to pick up some of his produce at the Farmers’ Market, his farm stand on Nordstrom Lane, or his off-and-on stand in front of Hogstone pizza in town. He owns Hogstone Wood Oven and Aelder; in other words, he grows really good food and cooks really good food.
What I like about giving him money upfront is that I don’t ever have to carry cash (because it’s rare that I carry cash). I can load my bags with his produce whenever I want and have the amount subtracted from my credit. I can send my kids to his stand whenever they’re in town in the summer and they can have fun picking out healthful, fresh things to munch on without getting money from me.
To give you an idea of what’s available right now, the picture here at right shows what I brought home today: massive bunches of 2 different types of kale ($3 each), 2 bunches of purple carrots ($3 each), a bag of blue (visually purple) potatoes ($2 per pound), a bag of a variety of peppers ($4 per pound), 2 huge leeks ($3 per pound), a massive bunch of beets with their greens ($3 per bunch?), 4 pears ($2.50 per pound), and an apple ($2.50 per pound). I paid a little under $35 for all of it. Yes, it’s more than produce at the store. But it’s worth it; it’s local, it supports sustainable ways of growing, it promotes a healthy environment, it’s fresh and internally clean, and it’s a feast for the eyes as well.
The first time I bought produce from my CSA credit at the farm stand, I loaded the car with five plastic bags full of tomatoes, plus some apples, pears, kale, peppers, and a few other things. It came to a little over $40. That may seem like a lot, but food prices at the store here on the island are not cheap. It’s hard to get a bag full of food for less than $30. And that’s the stuff on sale.
Thanks, John, for doing the right thing. It’s taken me awhile, but I’m on board now. Keep on keeping on!
