Did you know?

Did you know that there's such a thing as CSA? CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. My pal Becki has introduced me to this recently and honestly, I had no idea! Rather than buying one's produce at the grocery store, you become a member of a CSA. They hook you up with an organic farm somewhere in your area. And for your yearly fee, you get your once a week bag of seasonal produce, plus access to other farms at which you might purchase stuff like artisan cheeses, organic eggs, poultry and the like. Now some of these folks are a little intense for my comfort zone. They go on a bunch about pastured chickens (which I was reading as pasturized and getting mightily confused) which are basically chickens that are out in the open kind of running free their whole lives (until they get slaughtered so I can eat them) rather than cooped up with no space just pumping out the eggs and polluting the waterways with their miles of poop. And they tend toward being the type of folk who are into sustainable everything and thus know how to make cheese and knit and skin a deer and all those skills that evade me and probably always will even though I've boycotted Chilean fruit for years because even if they give me grapes out of season and make some nice wines, they never did bring Pinochet to justice and eventually he just died without something being done. (yes, I know, a little crazy, but hey, we all have our causes and that was mine)

Anyway, in my world, where right now there are only two of us in the house most of the time and we honestly wouldn't eat our way through an entire bag of produce each week and then I'd feel guilty that I totally lacked skills in canning and processing and whatever the hell else one would need to do to make use of all these vegies besides make an overload of vegetarian chili or dump them in a freezer bag or keep inviting the cul de sac over for dinner, I probably won't be joining a CSA any time soon.

But the idea intrigues. And I know Becki is really enjoying her double yolk eggs and artisinal lettuces and raw milk(yet another thing I honestly don't have the inclination to figure out what to do with). Becki is cool that way and knows how to brew her own beer and a zillion other things that blow my mind. And I like the warm and fuzzy of being able to take care of ourselves locally. That's a good thing, I'm sure.

Til next time...