| Today's came with patty pan squash (yum!), plums (double yum!), an oro blanco grapefruit (so sweet you can eat it plain), oranges (don't know what kind but they are amazing), green onions, some sort of lettuce, a salad with edible flowers, and a beautiful bouquet of flowers (mostly alstroemeria). If you take a look at that list, everything after the oranges will either NOT be eaten, or will be very reluctantly eaten. I can get the salad down if I put it in a locally made tortilla with some dressing. The flowers could actually be eaten... by my cats.
So why did I quit? I suppose first I ought to explain why I joined. I had a CSA a few years ago, when I lived in Wisconsin. That time around a friend and I split a half share from Harmony Valley. We were spoiled. Every week was like Christmas. The newsletters were top-notch, making eating fresh, organic, local, whole foods almost as easy as eating microwave dinners. Get your box, read the newsletter, and you're practically ready to eat. They told you how to store it, how to cook it, and how to use the ingredients from that week's box together to make a meal.
Another fantastic factor in that very positive CSA experience was my garbage disposal of a friend who I split the box with. If I didn't like something, he ate it. He often traded me, so that I'd get extra raspberries and he'd take the daikon, or whatever made sense that week. Better yet, if we got something that was unsplittable (like a winter squash), we'd agree to cook it together and split the meal that way. And he was an incredible cook. The sort of guy who never needed a recipe. He even baked his own bread, almost daily.
Now I'm on my own in California, and when it became feasible, I decided to get a CSA once again. I've been shopping at the farmers' market since I moved here but I miss the simplicity of the CSA. Here's your box, here's your newsletter, and you're done. Besides, my CSA in Wisconsin often reserved the best foods for its CSA members. Their stand at the market had all kinds of goodies, but the burdock, ramps, sorrel, or whatever other rare treats they had on hand were for the CSA members only.
I got lucky when I started searching for a CSA. My timing coincided with the publication of the very first issue of Edible San Diego (PDF alert). If you click the link, you'll find an article about CSA's in San Diego county, highlighting one called Seabreeze Organic Farm. The article had me drooling.
Better yet, I found out one of my favorite restaurants sources some of their food from Seabreeze - plus, Seabreeze is the closest of all the CSA farms and they deliver to your door. I was sold.
So why did I quit? The long and short of it is that I don't like to eat my greens. That's a lot of it. The funny thing is that I often go to restaurants and order a salad. When I've got a head of lettuce sitting in the fridge though, it will rot. And if it's arugula instead of lettuce...
I met up with the editor of Edible San Diego and she told me a trick she used: put your greens into smoothies. You'll never taste them. So off I went to the market to buy nearly $50 of berries. I dutifully hulled the strawberries and froze all of the berries on cookie sheets before putting them in bags in the freezer. Then every day I would make smoothies: honey, berries, soymilk, and greens. Sometimes I added herbs and other fruits too. Lettuce wasn't so bad. Bok choy actually worked quite well. Arugula, even in a smoothie, is a food I HATE.
One last gripe is that everything came in plastic bags. Instead of a reusable box like Harmony Valley, the entire package itself was in a large garbage bag. Within that there were several other plastic bags and often a few plastic boxes too. The egg cartons, at least, were something I could give back to farmers at my market to reuse. The rest went to the landfill.
I don't want to say only bad things about my CSA. I loved the eggs. My favorite part were the green eggs. Of course they look and taste the same on the inside, but I never get tired of the green eggshells. I took one to work and showed it to my co-workers. When one asked how I made it green, I told him it came from a green chicken.
The other contributing factor is not the fault of the CSA at all. My sink has been jammed up for a while now. My landlord's husband died of cancer, so first I waited for her to come back from the funeral, and since then I've told her twice. It's still broken. Cooking isn't very pleasant without a working sink.
Once the sink is fixed, I plan to join a new CSA, but I think I'll do a little bit more homework this time around. I want to compare prices a bit, because this last one cost me $63 a week, which is more than I'm prepared to spend (especially if some of the money goes for flowers, which I don't need or want).
I want to see what the newsletters are like. I like my CSA to treat my like I'm an idiot and tell me exactly what to do with the food. Sometimes I'm clever enough to figure out how to cook things on my own, but sometimes I'm not. The first time Harmony Valley gave me a winter squash, if they hadn't given me a simple recipe with it, I would've thought it was a Halloween decoration.
I think I'll most likely go with the Inland Empire CSA because the farmer, Phil, is my friend. He's a great guy. I like his food too. He lives further from me - 75 miles away - than Seabreeze, but at least he's in the 100 mile range. And I don't want to waste food anymore. I've wasted a lot of lettuce, bok choy, green onions, chives, and especially arugula over the past two months. |
