The Pros and Cons of CSAs
As harvest season, fall is both a time for abundance and a time for sadness. The farmers markets close down, and we begin to eye our freezers for ingredients rather heading to the produce stands. This past week has been particularly bittersweet for some Seattle locavores--the Seattle Market Gardens Community Supported Agriculture program, a partnership between in-city farmers and consumers resulting in weekly deliveries of locally grown organic produce during the growing season, ended last week. We were first-time subscribers. After providing us with 22 weeks of fresh local produce, the CSA has ended, leaving our crispers unexpectedly bare.
Between May and November, we drove to Green Lake every weekend to pick up a surprisingly heavy bag of vegetables, and we had built our cooking around it. We'd come to rely on the weekly picks up of local produce, including kale, carrots, lettuce, bok choy, potatoes, beets, and tomatoes, all grown in South Seattle to shape our diets. Now, the vegetables in our crisper sit there like prisoners on death row--they're the last of their kind. It's time to reflect on the whole experience; it was more of a change to our lifestyle than walking to QFC ever was, that's for sure.
Never subscribed to a CSA before? Read on for the pros and cons.
Pros
You'll eat more vegetables. After a few weeks, the consequences of the enforced vegetable schedule sink in: You're going to get another big bag of vegetables in the next seven days, so you'd better use the ones you got this week before they go bad. Unless you're a profoundly wasteful person, you'll probably eat them.
Your cooking will get more creative. Some CSAs allow you to pick the vegetables you get each week. Some do no not. (Seattle Market Gardens doesn't.) Either way, your CSA's stock of produce is limited by what can be grown locally. The contents our CSA box varied according to what was available that week. You'll get used to not knowing what's coming each week, and you'll learn to quickly change your dinner plans to account for something new and interesting. Besides the unpredictability, there will be mind-numbing regularity: there will probably be certain vegetables you get each week, and you will find new ways to cook them so you don't get bored to death. After two months of wracking our brains to find a way to use all the mizuna we were getting, we discovered the joys of mizuna pesto. We're still looking for a way to 4 heads of lettuce each week besides salads, though.
You'll eat organic, local food, and you'll do it cheap. Full shares at Seattle Market Gardens are $520, and half shares $310. A half share more than feeds two people, with some left over for the neighbors. At two people at 22 weeks, a half share works out to $7 a person, which is an incredible deal considering how much produce you get each week. You'll ignore Whole Foods, shun Town and Country Markets and sniff haughtily at PCC, because you'll be eating truly local food. This is produce that's grown in the backyards of Seattle.
Cons
You lose your freedom of choice. You might not get to pick what vegetables you eat with each week. Like we said above, this forces you to get creative. But the key word here is "forces." If you're used to bringing the same sandwich to work for lunch each day and cooking the same roast with root vegetables every Saturday, this is going to cramp your style. You may get potatoes, carrots, kale, and tomatoes one week, and basil, bok choy, beets, chard, and lettuce the next. You won't get to plan the week's menu until you open up your CSA bag.
You're going to get some bugs. Bugs are gross. Bugs eat produce. The produce in your CSA was probably bagged by the person who picked it, and it might not be as clean as supermarkets and fruit stands have led you to believe produce is. Aphids eat kale, beetles eat tomatoes, and slugs eat everything. You'll have to remove them from time to time.
You'll be sad when it ends. Freedom of choice is overrated, and we're willing to deal with a few bugs if it means our crisper is overflowing with good, local produce every week. Time to start looking for a winter-season farm to tide us over until May.
