{"id":3,"date":"2009-01-23T08:20:21","date_gmt":"2009-01-23T15:20:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michelle.betor.org\/?p=3"},"modified":"2009-02-25T18:27:35","modified_gmt":"2009-02-26T01:27:35","slug":"local-eating-csas-for-produce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/michelle.betor.org\/?p=3","title":{"rendered":"Local Eating &#8211; CSAs for produce"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the years I&#8217;ve been attempting to eat more local foods.&nbsp; Initially, I simply joined a summer CSA &#8212; vegetables, fruit, and flowers on a weekly basis.&nbsp; The next year I joined the same CSA again, but for the entire 3 seasons &#8212; April through early December.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Pluses:&nbsp; <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We ate better &#8212; considerably more produce than we would have purchased on our own.&nbsp;\n<li>It was fresher, and I really like knowing where my food is from &#8212; I like meeting the farmers, I like knowing it is organic, and where it is grown.\n<li>I discovered that my dislike of salads was due to the traditional iceburg lettuce &#8212; spring greens on the other hand, make a great salad.&nbsp;\n<li>Garlic scapes make good garlic butter\n<li>I learned that turnip greens cooked southern style are quite good, and young turnips blend just fine with potatoes in soup.\n<li>Many greens can be steamed and frozen for later, and spinach (or chard, or&#8230;..) makes a wonderful addition to my breakfast casserole.\n<li>I may not like blueberries plain, but they are yummy in a warm muffin so that they are all soft and melty\n<li>Fennel bulb is surprisingly tasty &#8212; and I now have a great recipe for a fennel, italian sausage, and swiss cheese entree!\n<li>Fresh peaches make a great cobbler\n<li>There&#8217;s nothing quite like local-grown just-picked corn (not organic), grilled.\n<li>There&#8217;s no such thing as too many sweet cherries, or blackberries.\n<li>A weekly bag of seasonal produce results in learning to use new items. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Negatives:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A full brown grocery bag of produce each week is too much for just two people who aren&#8217;t vegetarian, leading to waste\n<li>We got a lot of items that one of us either wouldn&#8217;t (rasberries, rutabagas) or couldn&#8217;t (sage, bell peppers) eat &#8211; see waste\n<li>Some things we never could figure out what to do with &#8212; kohlrabi for instance.\n<li>Many local\/seasonal items are time-consuming and complicated to prepare, not a plus for a working couple (beets!)\n<li>Finding a CSA with times\/places for pickup that works out is not necessarily easy. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>While in general the pluses outweighed the negatives, the amount of wastage (and not having a convenient pickup) meant we didn&#8217;t do a CSA the last couple of&nbsp; years.&nbsp; This year I&#8217;m trying again &#8212; I found a vegetable CSA that is every-other week, with Sat afternoon pickups nearby and we&#8217;re doing the original fruit share again &#8212; that&#8217;s weekly on Thursdays, but back to being on Mike&#8217;s way home, and only for the summer.&nbsp;&nbsp; I&#8217;m hopeful that a half-share of produce will be easier to manage, while still meeting all the pluses!&nbsp;&nbsp; As we did last year, we&#8217;ll supplement with farmers markets, now that we know where a few different ones are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the years I&#8217;ve been attempting to eat more local foods.&nbsp; Initially, I simply joined a summer CSA &#8212; vegetables, fruit, and flowers on a weekly basis.&nbsp; The next year I joined the same CSA again, but for the entire 3 seasons &#8212; April through early December.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Pluses:&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p> We ate better &#8212; considerably [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[11,20,10],"class_list":["post-3","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-eating","tag-csa","tag-local-eating","tag-sustainability","odd"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prFvO-3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michelle.betor.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michelle.betor.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michelle.betor.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michelle.betor.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michelle.betor.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/michelle.betor.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44,"href":"http:\/\/michelle.betor.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions\/44"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michelle.betor.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michelle.betor.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michelle.betor.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}