This has been the summer of vegetables. Yellow-ripe, sweet heirloom tomatoes. Bulbs of garlic still attached to their long, strange stalks. Giant crisp heads of lettuce. Red-jacketed potatoes; purple, yellow, and white onions; haricots verts; French breakfast radishes; frilly Napa cabbage and sturdy purple cabbage; ears of corn; garlic scapes and scallions and leeks.
My sister and fiancé and I joined our local Brooklyn CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) this summer. It’s the next step beyond shopping at the city’s greenmarkets: a collective of city people who want both to access fresh produce and to support regional farmers. You pay for the June through October season and volunteer four hours per household at the weekly distribution, weighing out half-pounds of leggy spinach or checking names off for the egg share. It’s a pretty great system.
Every Wednesday night, we picked up pounds of produce and lugged it home and stared at it, sometimes in glee, sometimes with dismay. How do three people eat five pounds of bursting ripe tomatoes before they rot? Answer: you make sauce, you eat tomatoes and cheese on toast for lunch, and you put the last few in the fridge even though that is heretical.
We’ve gotten creative with our cooking, fueled by the need to eat up all the vegetables. One night, exhausted, Steven and I roasted corn and sauteed up a bunch of green things, sliding gently fried eggs on top. We sat down, looked at our plates, and realized the entire meal (minus the olive oil, salt, and pepper) had come from our farm in upstate New York.
We’ve also had be creative while learning what the heck to do with some of the items. Garlic scapes come to mind as being particularly confusing, and they arrived in one of our very first shares. We worked that out okay. The radish greens were less successful. We ate them, but they could have been more delicious. Those came early on, too.
Of course, with all these natural and unprocessed items, we’ve had a few unwelcome stowaways. Before I sat down to write this post, I made quick pickles from the radishes that had been lingering in the crisper for a few weeks. I was hacking off the gross bits; I sliced the knife through and pulled it out with a quarter-inch long white worm clinging on. Gross, man.
But imperfection and yes, ickiness, are byproducts of exactly the system we are supporting: small farmers rather than industry giants, produce that flaunts its small-scale origins instead of hiding in plastic packages. No baby carrots in our CSA—just knobbly ones, yellow as well as rust-colored.
I’ll admit that when I signed up, I wasn’t thinking about the implications beyond forcing—er, encouraging—myself to eat more fresh vegetables. But Steven keeps mentioning that we are supporting people, hopefully helping make it possible for them to continue in their livelihood of farming. It’s a web. A delicious one.
I haven’t really read Wendell Berry, though he has been on my reading list for some time now, but he writes about these connections:
“The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.”
I’ve been a vegetarian for at least ten years now, mainly because I just don’t like meat very much and think factory farming is gross, but it seems I’ve accidentally gone a step further: I’m supporting a non-dominant system. Farming and gardening and eating locally are trendy—but they’re also sort of counter-cultural.
I wonder if many city dwellers are looking to do more than just eat some delicious, fresh food. I know I wasn’t—but now that I know I am, it feels kind of good.
After graduating with an English degree, Amy (Allen) Frieson (’10) moved to New York City and spent several exhilarating years working in children’s book publishing. Now, she works as a career consultant and has much more time for writing, reading, wandering the city, cooking non-vegetarian meals (a new thing), dreaming about apartment renovations, and leading worship along with her husband at their NYC CRC.
