CSA programs

i'm not that into it. i'd rather just go buy the fruit and vegetables that i want instead of
>here's 9000 pounds of spaghetti squash and an apple

>>8651902
Exactly this. Just go to a farmer's market and call it a day.

>>8651902
this, it sounds like a great way to get a truckload of zucchini that you'll be forced to make into spiralized """""pasta""""" rather than endure the guilt of wasting it.

You have to be really into spending bunch of money in order to support local organic produce and being willing to eat whatever the fuck they happen to have pulled out of the ground that day (protip: most people aren't).

when you eat as much fri-ri as i do, these things are a godsend

>>8651885
i've done a couple. the first one i did was mostly squash. the second one was mostly tomatillos.

picking it up also became a huge hassle.

what i want (and why i originally did the csa thing) is someone to pick out groceries that normal people are supposed to get. having to pick it up after work and winding up with a bushel of parsley and a hogshead of tomatillos made me resent having to go and pick up all this crap.

i still wish i could get something like a "trunk club" for groceries where they just give me a bunch of shit and i can tell them what i think is stupid.

>>8651885
it's only useful if you've got a family of 3+ - no one person will eat all the produce every week

File: csa-9-27-12.jpg (1MB, 2816x2112px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 2816x2112px

What these are really good for is illustrating, very vividly, the extent to which your eating habits depend on international trade, petrochemicals, and so on. Basically the way it works is:

June through October: insane onslaught of vegetables and fruits in overwhelming quantities. You have to struggle to keep up and you're constantly googling for new recipes. Even still, some of it goes to waste

November through December: Suddenly things are getting scarce, just apples, winter squash, potatoes, and onions. Suddenly the meat, dairy, and eggs become a lot more noticeable under the thinning piles of vegetables

January through April: Enjoy your leaf lard, eggs, and soup bones. Sometimes, bacon. If you're lucky, a beef shank. Occasionally, a steak.

May through June: Finally, a few things. I can stop going to Whole Foods every week to buy stuff flown in from the Southern Hemisphere on a jet plane.

Everyone who voted for Trump should try it, then they might think twice about the wisdom of slamming our borders shut because MUH JERRBS.

>>8652837
What an incredibly stupid thing to say. You are confusing cause and effect to a ridiculous degree. There are plenty of vegetables that can be harvested in early spring, the reason you wont get them in a program like this is that it it is hardly worth farmers producing them. They are low value, 'old-fashioned' crops. Ironically if all these bay area hipsters really wanted this sort of program to be serious, they would need to encourage these things to be grown.
Because it is so cheap to buy things grown in a hotter country, and you can have a continuous supply of 'popular' crops, it destroys any market for those winter/spring crops. There is no reason it has to be that way, especially in America, which has plenty of agricultural land.

>>8652868
The market incentives you are describing are caused by oversubsidizing the fossil fuel industry (making it cheaper to fly in vegetables from Chile than to grow them locally) and the feed monocroppers (mostly soy and corn). Yes, if you shut the borders you can no longer buy stuff from Chile, but there's still the rest of the distortion effects from encouraging misuse of land and driving down the prices of a small number of crops because the guys growing sunchokes and radishes don't have the same lobbying power as the groups that grow corn and soy. It will just set us back to the early 1980s when the only vegetables you could get at the average midwestern grocery store were carrots, onions, and iceberg lettuce.

>>8651885
in san diego we have a place called 'specialty produce' and they have a 'farmers market box' where you pay something liek $20 and you get a fuckton of food from local farms. its pretty cool, you tend to get exotic veggies that you wouldnt normally see at the store or anything.


i like it better than doing a csa because if i dont want it i just dont buy it for one or 2 weeks. the csa's ive looked at tend to be somthing more expensive and supply a few weeks worth of food, though they dont have as much variety as this farmers market box.

>>8651885
I've been involved with two. One was poorly run and it was kale coming out of your ears. The other (that I still participate in) gives a good variety of veggies weekly at a cheaper price than the farmers' market.

There is an issue though. Your choice of what you want to eat is taken away from you to some degree if you don't want to waste any food. It's like getting a puzzle every week that you have to solve - this is what came in on the farm, so this is what you have to cook before it goes bad. The advantage is that you're getting fresh, local in-season produce. But the work on your part is figuring out what meals you're going to make to use up the assortment you got that week. It's particularly a challenge at the end of the season when you get overloaded with squashes and sweet potatoes.

That said I think my CSA is totally worth it. Twenty some bucks a week pretty much means I don't have to buy any vegetables all summer. And the stuff I get is much better quality than what's in the fucking supermarket. Yeah, I have to cook what I get instead of what I feel like cooking any given moment. But it's nice to eat seasonally during the local growing season.