Choosing a CSA

Exciting news: I just received an email informing me that Turtle Bay CSA received my check. I officially have one vegetable share reserved under my name! After listlessly poking through my dinner (a dismal mess of soggy salad leaves with mealy tomatoes), the prospect of normal tasting food makes me very happy...

I know it's hard to believe, but a year ago, "CSA" meant nothing to me. When I first discovered CSA's, I fell in love with the idea right away. I wiki'd CSA, I googled it, I browsed a few sites and I thought it all seemed fairly straightforward. You buy a "share" of produce from your farmer, you pick it up each week, and that's that.

Turns out there's a lot more to it than that. Farms are essentially small businesses, adapting and adjusting to the local market. The end result? As many varieties of CSA structures as there are varieties of apples (fun fact: there are 7500+ varieties of apples worldwide!) All of this makes customizing your CSA experience easier, but it can be overwhelming for a first timer (me).

Everyone has different ways of going about things. I started my search for the perfect CSA by pretending I was looking for a boyfriend.* I made a preliminary list of "dealmakers" and "dealbreakers" to weed out the bad apples and narrow things down.

Dealmakers/Dealbreakers

• Must be located nearby (preferably less than 10 minutes away): If I had to lug a sack of produce halfway across Manhattan...I just wouldn't go. I'm lazy, what can I say? I'm also realistic. It's called "managing expectations." But seriously, if I can't even haul my sorry little ass to the gym which is like... three blocks away from me, there's no way I can motivate myself to drag bags of carrots and lettuce cross-town. Especially in the sweltering NY summer heat. Okay, the more I think about this, the more I realize that I should be ashamed. Three blocks. Yes. Next.

Tip: Local Harvest is a fantastic site for screening CSA's by location.


• Must be super fresh: If it's less fresh than the corner deli, what's the point?! Also, remember...I'm a picky person. If it's not fresh, I'm not going to eat it, except out of desperation. And desperate girls = hard times. A situation to be avoided by all parties at all costs.



• Must have convenient pick up times: I just graduated and there are no summer interns yet. This means I'm the very bottom of the corporate totem pole. I know I'm polite and charming and all, but I still can't imagine my boss reacting very well if I casually mentioned, "Oh, by the way, brb. Gotta skip out and pick up my weekly fruits and vegetables. Thx." Yeah, not happening.



• Must be reasonably priced: I'm poor yo (relatively speaking). Student loans and all that. Plus, Manhattan COL is absurdly high. I'm sure entire families live off of my monthly rent for a full YEAR in other parts of the world. I know, I know. #firstworldproblems



• Must be reasonably sized: Somewhat related to the pricing question. I can't possibly eat five cabbages in one week (nor should I for the sake of those around me). I also don't have the time to preserve or can extra produce. So either I find a CSA with individual sized shares or I convince someone to let me split a share with them.

By the time I finished screening for these dealmakers/breakers, I had a much smaller list to choose from. I picked through the remainders for the perfect CSA with my next list:

Nice to have:

• Pretty website/blog (bonus points for pictures): Some of the CSA's I stumbled upon had great blogs with weekly updates on how the season was progressing. They had great pictures of each week's produce as well, which I thought was fantastic. It also helped me gauge share size. I know it's hard work to update and maintain websites and blogs, so I appreciated the effort from the farmers and CSA's that much more. Plus, it adds legitimacy to the CSA/farm. When you see a track record of quality and high performance, you worry less about the competency of the CSA/farm.



• Similar values or customer demographic: I don't think it's a dealbreaker if the CSA or farm doesn't cater to my demographic, but it's nice to have. For example, if someone felt passionately about organic produce, they could search for an organic CSA. On the other hand, if a small family wanted a CSA with a local community focus, they could choose one that allowed for family farm outings, family-oriented activities, kid-friendly produce, etc. Other CSA's tended to cater towards foodies (purple carrots!) or young people with time-suck careers (lower time obligations and commitments). Guess which one I picked.



• Variety of produce: For me, the freshness of the produce is more important than the variety. Having said that, it's always nice to have a wide range of different vegetables to choose from. Some farms go one step further and collaborate with each other to bring a wider offering of local products to their customers. For example, some CSA's have add-ons like fruit shares, eggs, chickens, fresh flowers, dairy products, honey and cheese. Exciting stuff!

After browsing some more, I found The One. Turtle Bay CSA. Nailed all my criteria.

This brings us to the present. We'll see how this summer fling goes. Maybe I'll stick around for the long haul ;).

On a totally related note, Jeremy Lin is going to be my husband. It really is related**. We were just talking about The One, weren't we? <3 JLin

*No, this is not actually how I go about looking for boyfriends. But maybe I should. haha..

**I just want to point out that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Jeremy Lin is healthy looking (see below for evidence). I bet he eats vegetables too.

TOTALLY RELEVANT:


I would never desperately justify the presence of JLin pictures in a blog about vegetables. Desperate girls = avoid at all costs, remember? Besides, the JLin-vegetable connection isn't really that much of a stretch. I bet you could come up with a dozen horrific Lin puns. EggpLINt? LINteloupe? Community Supported AgLINculture? Ok ok I'll stop. I'm making myself cringe too.

Also, if he ever signs up for a CSA, I call dibs on splitting a share with him. Girl can dream right?

Snail mail

For maybe the first time in my life, I can't wait to check my bank account online and see a lower balance.

I wonder how they process all of the checks. Who handles the reconciliation between the online signup and the receipt of checks? Seems a bit slow and antiquated, but I can understand - card processing fees are mad annoying.

Maybe someday, there will be a unified effort to have CSA's accept online forms of payment. In the meantime, I get to eagerly anticipate seeing that check go through!

Fruit of my Labor

More accurately, vegetables of my labor. Haha.

I touched on the reasons why I started looking for a CSA in my last post, but I forgot to mention which CSA I ended up with after all my research!

I ultimately decided on Turtle Bay CSA, which partners with Free Bird Farm. They offer a vegetable share for $500 plus a $15 administration fee, along with fruit shares, eggs, and chickens. I restrained myself from signing up for everything, but only barely. If I cooked more regularly than once every two weeks, I would definitely consider signing up for the other shares. Plus, given that this is my first CSA experience, I thought it might be smart to try out the vegetable share first and see how that goes.

I looked through the Free Bird Farm blog with posts on last summer’s weekly produce offerings, and it seems like you get quite a lot of veg for the $$$ you pay. For $500, you get 22 weeks worth of produce, which could easily supply a family of four. That's about $6 per person per week. Not bad.

I love good quality produce and I'll eat a lot more vegetables than the average person in a week. Still, even I can’t eat that much veg in one week, so I persuaded/coerced my lovely roommate into splitting a share with me. :D She’s pretty appreciative of fresh produce as well, so it worked out great.

CSA sign ups are in February and previous CSA members get first dibs on shares. Fortunately, there was still room for new members, so I signed up as soon as they announced the extra space. We just sent in our check for the vegetable share. I’m so excited! The prospect of fresh produce is making me positively giddy. Produce nerd right here, what’s up.

No but seriously, I can’t wait. It’s been a dreary, if mild, winter. Good thing we have cute pictures like this:

BONUS PICTURE:

Why CSA?

First blog post!

I guess it would be appropriate to use my first post to touch on why I started this blog in the first place.

While I've never really been a picky eater, I’ve always been picky about my produce. If it's not fresh, I generally won't touch it. Lately, I’ve become ever more interested in local sourcing, as I’ve long maintained that local produce tends to be fresher and taste better. Farmer’s markets, apple picking trips, and diligent searching through grocery store produce aisles usually worked for me, but after moving to NY and starting a job, I realized that these are time-luxuries that I just can’t afford any more.

Farmer’s markets are generally held during my work hours and they’re not exactly conveniently located either*. The grocery stores and delis near my apartment offer an acceptable collection of produce, but after biting into one too many mealy apples, I gave up on that as well. In my search for a viable alternative, I stumbled upon the world of CSA’s (Community Supported Agriculture). The more I read, the more intriguing I found the whole CSA concept. I decided to give it a try.

However, as I signed up for a CSA, it dawned on me how difficult it had been for me to pull the information I was looking for. Compared to finding a local grocery store, finding a good source of local food was definitely more of a challenge. Plus, not a lot of people know what a CSA even is. I imagine there’s a lot of people out there who would be interested in CSA’s and locally sourced food for a variety of reasons, so I set out to chronicle my own adventures in an attempt to gather more information and put it in a format that might come in handy to someone someday.

In addition, the whole dialogue around local sourcing and CSA’s is fascinating and ever-evolving. I wanted to have a place where I could muse out loud and sort through my own opinions on the many discussions being held in the local food space.

So there it is in a nutshell: this blog is really just my place to ruminate on CSA’s and serve as a place for me to collect information so that I can pass it on to my friends and family should they ever decide they want to know more.

*Or I'm lazy?