Community-supported marathon
For the past 11 years, I have participated in one form or another of community-supported agriculture, where every week I either go to a farm and pick up a bag of veggies, or someone plunks a bag of veggies on my doorstep.
CSAs are a specific way of engaging with a farm. It ensures income for the farm during the growing season, and it allows you to get stuff directly from the farm. CSAs are not vegetable subscription boxes that are sourced from a variety of farms. They are, in their purest form, a way of connecting with one specific farm.
It is always delicious, the best possible expression of what the thing is. CSA turnips are the most turnipy. CSA squash is the most squashy. But you receive what is in season. It is effectively random. You have no agency in this process. You never receive enough allium or fungi.
I love when something promises a certain way of existing in the world, and the lived experience never matches the broader perception. One always joins a CSA with noble intention, and then they have to figure out the fact of it, the practice of being within it. Being in a CSA feels like a bit of a marathon, where for the first few years you are challenged to figure out what kohlrabi is, and then how to make a meal around it. Fail and you end up wasting a lot of kohlrabi.
One gets less bad at this over time. Kohlrabi works amazingly in curry. Kohlrabi is genetically related to cabbage and broccoli; it fares well under the same cooking conditions. One generally removes its leaves and peels it before cooking. Now you have a grammar around kohlrabi. This takes a few googlings, some dead ends, more than one mistake.
Even when you know what to do with something, it’s not guaranteed that you will be able to make it happen. Thanks to my CSA, there are collards in my fridge right now. The best way to make collards is to stew them in bacon fat, apple cider vinegar, and stock for (checks watch) five hours. Separately, you fry a pound of bacon and a couple of chopped red onions in a little bacon fat with a lot of black pepper. Toss the two together at the end and you’re done. Collards need time, which I have none of during the summer. Collards need volume; thanks to my CSA, I have only one bunch of collards. Collards need lots of people, especially meat-eating people. To add insult, I am not receiving any red onions in my CSA. But these are the most collardy collards you can possibly get, and so they will be made… eventually.
In addition to the googling one will do, at the last minute, standing in one’s kitchen, CSA members have to commit to cooking on a consistent schedule. In the Before Times™, this was much harder. Now that people are being more discerning in their scheduling, it is easier – for me, at least – to find the time to plan home-cooked meals for the week. And it’s cheaper, too.
I wonder how many people are looking to sign up for CSAs now. When the Bad Times® hit, dozens of people asked me about my CSA: where it was, how they could sign up. The answer is: I sat on a waitlist for 8 years, was starting in 2006. And almost every proper CSA in Chicagoland was completely sold out by the third week of March. What does it look like now? Did people give up their memberships, and if so, why?