Jiminy crickets, July, you’re here already!

A View from a CSA picnic at Farmdale Organics, 2011.
Photo Credit: CSA archives

Summer is in its glory (as are the rain clouds!), and my how the time flies when we’re working, living, avoiding the rain, and collecting shares! Despite the radio silence of our blog, our office has experienced anything but! From fielding farmers’ crop predictions, to designing yummy veggie shares that include those crops, to drafting and sending newsletters, to coordinating weekly farm visits (you’re always invited to tag along!), to planning the upcoming farm picnic (later this month at Farmdale Organics; more details to follow – email us at csa@lancasterfarmfresh.com!), we have been a-buzz with activity here in the office.

Some of the best soil in the country, courtesy of Farmdale Organics.
Photo Credit: CSA archives

We are thankful for the rain and the growth it enables, but we’re also a little over it when it caused widespread strawberry shortages in early June for our fruit shareholders and undesirable Tatsoi just earlier this week! We are never beyond the reach of the rewarding yet risky nature of a CSA—even in a cooperative of 80+ organic farms! Despite the large number of farms that grew strawberries this year, we did have to send value added replacements of some of our farmers’ other fruit goodies like jam and applesauce.

Not quite ripe blueberries at Echo Valley Organics.
Photo credit: Sara Hummer

In other fruit share news, we’re excited to note that as the world turns, so do the fruits of our shares… You all who collect the fruits of our farmers’ local labor are enjoying cherries, blueberries, and raspberries (the raspberries have also gotten a bit water-logged, though, unfortunately) at this point. Yum! Pies and jams, anyone?

Green Beans at Echo Valley Organics.
Photo Credit: Sara Hummer

Speaking of changing share contents, we hope that you’re as excited as we are to start seeing more veggie varieties in the weekly ration. We know some shareholders (coworkers here at the coop included) were growing tired of monochromatic salads every day—greens, greens, greens? Officially, we, the CSA team, weren’t; we thought it was pretty awesome, but know this: trudge through those nutrient-packed green-leafies no more! Potatoes, garlic, onions, green beans, zucchini, and summer squashes are here! Tomatoes are on their way! Time to count your veggie blessings, folks!

Join your grassroots, locally-grown, herbal healthcare movement !

Lancaster Farmacy seeks to grow and provide local organic medicine for our community. Our goal is to support our bio region by securing the opportunity for all living beings to have access to food and medicine. We are reclaiming our health by growing our own medicine and restoring the knowledge of natural healing traditions.

Sign up now for Community Supported herbal Medicine Shares offered by LFFC member farm, Lancaster Farmacy. Receive 6 months of fresh, hand-grown and crafted organic herbs and products and gain knowledge on how to use plants to heal yourself naturally. By the end of the season, you will fill your home medicine cabinet or kitchen cupboard with these useful products we are proud to make for our community.                                                                    

We will provide you with fresh and dried teas, tinctures, infused oils, salves and more all made directly from the plants we grow on our farm and ethically wild-craft in the Lancaster area. Shares will include remedies for common conditions like colds, digestive issues, detoxification, skin conditions, improving immunity, relaxation, sleep, and more. You will receive an informative newsletter about what you receive with each share. 

We look forward to sharing the season with you and welcome you to come experience our farm and what we do on coop work party days throughout the season.

In health,
eli and casey
www.lancasterfarmacy.blogspot.com

Keeping on with Heirloom Eats while Finding New but Worthy Repeats

Last year was my first with the coop and with any CSA for that matter. I’d never before seen or heard of a bitter melon or many of the other veggies we received in our shares throughout the course of the 2012 Spring-Summer bounty. Kohlrabi. Broccoli raab. Lemon cucumbers. Fava beans. African Horned melons. Bitter melons. Almost countless were the inquiries about the cylindrical vegetable with spiky green flesh. We also grew accustomed to fielding questions about the oval shaped specimen that was also spiky but less green and more yellow in color. Luckily, for all of us, I don’t think these two veggies were included in one share any given week of their harvest. System overload!

Google Images

For anyone who has tried both veggies, I was fond of the African Horned Melon, but no, I didn’t like the bitter melon either. Or, perhaps, I should more accurately say, “I didn’t like this veggie because I had no idea how to cook it and very possibly did so wrongly.” When I cooked the bitter melon, I didn’t blanche it for 2-3 minutes or scrape the center seeds and pith out, nor did I, after slicing, steep the slices in salted water for 15-20 minutes beforehand. Suffering through a few nights of stir-fry with bitter melon as one of the main ingredients I guess isn’t SO bad, right? They’re good for us with their high vitamin content which includes Phosphorus, Magnesium, Iron, Potassium, Pantothenic Acid, Vitamin B6, Choline, Folate, and Lutein as cited by Livestrong.com.

Google Images

Food—what we grow, make, buy, and eat, and how we belong, identify and explore—almost always has an accompanying tradition to explain its place at (or absence from) our dinner table. Maybe every autumn your family enjoys apple pie prepared and baked the same way your great-grandparents did. Maybe every holiday season you make appropriately shaped chocolate candies with your neighbors. Or, maybe every Valentine’s Day, you make cupcakes with pink frosting because though the Easy Bake oven has long been outgrown, the tradition remains. These food-community-personal associations mean a lot—so much, that our experiences are flavored with them. We would love for your experience with our CSA veggie shares to add even more color to the flavor “palate.”

Google Images

Maybe you’ll notice a difference year-to-year of how soon or late in the season you receive a certain veggie. Maybe you’ll learn how to complement its flavor with culinary mastery and based on the learning curve, have a great new tradition to share. Now take, for example, our friend the bitter melon. What could be greater than starting a new seasonal tradition, or learning together, based on new-to-you or less-than-familiar vegetable items in your CSA shares? If you were a shareholder last summer, you might remember receiving a slender yet spiky and green yet bitter, vegetable item that was hard to figure out what to do with.

To hopefully remedy this now and onward, we have a few outlets at your disposal to rifle through. Sara has been pinteresting (verb form of Pinterest, anyone?), oh right, pinning, recipe after recipe in hopes of giving us all a better arsenal in the kitchen. We also have a recipe group blog that has been active for a few seasons now so the archives are great resources, too. Facebook is perhaps our most active tentacle with many of our CSA members sharing not only our farmers’ harvest but recipes, tips, and how-to’s as well.  If you’re interested in checking out the recipe blog, please click here: http://lffccsarecipegroup.blogspot.com/

Google Images

Also, stay tuned in to our various social media channels as we work to bring the equally as various parts of our locavore culture together when we ask some of our famous chef friends if they’d be interested in hosting a how-to video or two for us. Proper knife skills, maybe? By “proper” I mean safe yet impressive. Or, maybe we’ll film an upcoming canning workshop or healthy eating lecture.



At any rate, our food knowledge and food traditions can take shape from a range of circumstances: our favorite cooking show, Googling recipes for an unfamiliar veggie, family history, childhood memories, where we grew up, where we live, what we prefer, tradition, culture, expanded horizons, what we receive in our shares, etc. At any rate, food traditions, our cherished, memories-in-practice, are important to who we are, and in the realization of these choices about food and tradition, is the opportunity to make a change or sustain. If I had to boil down my last year of experience with food, my own traditions, others’ traditions, and our organic vegetables, I would say, this is a change I want to sustain. In with the clean, green, organic veggie regime, and out with the added salt, added sugar, added hormones, additives, preservatives, antibiotics, cheap fillers, byproducts, and what have you.

CSA File Photo 

TGIS (Thank Goodness it's Spring)

Leola’s trees have green buds that look like a rogue artist with a stippling brush painted them when we weren’t looking. The grass is growing clump-by-clump as it does so early on—one clump of exceedingly emerald green grass here, another further over that way, and soon they’ll spread like a wild grass-fire. Our friends, the birds, are back, too, with their Spring sing-a-long song reminders that we, the people, aren’t the only creative ones with something to say. Every Spring is a gift as the days lengthen, nights shorten, and lives awaken for seasonal renewal.

We’re thankful for this. What this also means is our gracious Mother Earth spins on, central Sun burns and radiates warmer to hot, and our lunar lady Moon-friend still guides from her changeable nightly post. Thanks to the planets staying in motion and Nature at least edging on predictable, we are now in alignment for our next CSA season. Rise on, Spring. Rise on.

We hope you’re as excited as we are about the upcoming shares! The pictures below are from Sara's recent visit with Eli at Elm Tree Organics. The impressive greenhouse is a new addition for Eli and family.

Cage Free, Free Range, and Pasture Raised, oh my!

Sound like the egg section in your grocer's dairy aisle? We thought so. The Story of an Egg, a short film part of a larger project titled "The Lexicon of Sustainability" takes a closer look at agriculture by utilizing varied modes of communication and sharing such as photo collage, animation, hand-written typography, and social networking to navigate words and ideas.

Click here if you'd like to watch The Story of an Egg thanks to PBS.org. Filmmaker, photographer and writer, Douglas Gayeton, was the director and photographer for this amazing production. Check it out. Tell your friends about it. We heart (re)thinking.  Thank you, PBS!
 

Foodie Memory: This is What Sara Said

I grew up spending most of my time outside. Creek swimming, family hikes, fort building, camping- “Go outside” was the answer to any suggestion of boredom. To go with my generally outdoorsy upbringing, my family engrained an environmental ethic and awareness into both me and my brother which has stayed with both of us for our entire lives. Discussions of energy use, climate change, pollution, preservation, development, and sustainability were common. My parents did, and do, believe these issues were and are important, and it was not unusual for conversations to drift to these subjects over dinner. 

But over what dinner? While my mom always meant well, supplementing veggies from the garden or farm stand with items from the one lone little grocery store in my town, environmental concern never really drifted from the conversation down to the dinner plate. As we kids got bigger, schedules got busier, and more and more cheap and processed food made a presence in our house. Grab it! Go! It didn’t take long before the family with such strong environmental values was eating in a way that regularly undermined their own beliefs. I went away to college with the eating habits I had developed. While I’d eat fruits and vegetables, I didn’t really think about if they were organic and more often than not I subscribed to the collegiate concept of dinner: If it comes from a packet and can be boiled and sauced- it’s dinner. Cheap meat on the Foreman Grill? Dish up.

Once away at school, I took environmental class after environmental class- and more and more I was faced with the conflict between the conventional food system and my values. Food miles, the treatment of animals, water pollution, energy use, endocrine disruption and the bioaccumulation of chemicals and antibiotics, the more I learned about the conventional food system, the more uncomfortable with my eating habits I became, but little change was made. Graduate school led to even more conversations about food and ethics and sustainable development. Although I had been exposed to a great deal of information about the industrialized food system and importance of alternative models while in college, it wasn’t until I was working through Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation for Environmental Ethics that I came face to face with the hypocrisy of my eating and consumption habits. I could no longer make excuses for my consumption habits clashing directly with my environmental values. I promptly dropped meat entirely and began the transition to a primarily organic diet.

The shift to a more ethical and sustainable diet has been a relatively easy one. Having access to organic produce and on rare occasions, ethically and humanely raised meat, through LFFC has been wonderful and allows me to better reconcile my environmental values with my diet. It’s not necessarily practical for many of us to completely eliminate our impact on the environment, but changing your food, making the simple choice to pick food produced in a way that does no harm to the workers, land, water, and animals that create it, that’s an easy choice and simple change and one I’m glad I’ve made.
Thank you, Google Images and CSA Files for included pictures. 

Fooding Part-way Down Memory Lane and All-the-way Back.

We, the CSA chatter-people, were doing just that the other day—talking about food (as we always do) and (this time) what we remember about it growing up, you know how it has or hasn’t changed for each of us. Because we were in our office space, we circled back to favorite meals we had as kids after we touched base about dietary staples growing up. If we’d had this conversation offline over a jovial cup of coffee at a local brew house, we would have just allowed the conversation to happen itself back to childhood memories rather than circle back, but at the end of the day, we are grown-up professionals now.

Truth: some of my favorite things to eat as a kid were the processed, prepared and preserved meat and cheese meals laden with preservatives and additives that now make me sick to my stomach. Microwavable chili. Abnormally large cans of beef stew. Hot dogs. Frozen, like delivery, pizza. Bread pockets of scalding meat and molten cheese. Vacuum-packed plastic trays of seemingly always unequal amounts of meat, crackers, and cheese. Crispy cookie cereal. Anything non-perishable, sugary, and cheap. (Blue) box (blues) macaroni and cheese was always a treat at home, and mozzarella sticks were the holy (edible) grail at horse shows and events from the food vendor.

I only realized the cliché-ness of my experience when I was getting tattooed recently, and the artist asked after hearing I’m vegan, “so did you watch all the necessary documentaries?” I laughed and said yes. She was right. However, and there is always a however, I’m glad I did—cliché or not. I only started questioning my own food when I switched my dogs to holistic food after learning kibbles and bits more about the dog food industry’s misleading labeling. Some defining personal food moments were cliché no doubt, yet the assumed societal commonality of my experience didn’t dilute my later comprehension and enactment of change. Thankfully.

In our collective experience and pooled memories, it seems the changes in our moral eating and eating morale, began after the questions did. Where does the food we eat come from? Where does the chicken in my chicken Caesar salad come from when I’m at [insert chain or independent restaurant here]? What was the factory or farm like? Were this chicken’s friends nice? And, what about the dairy products in the bright orange cheese powder for mac n’ cheese—were the cows involved treated well and free of hormones, antibiotics, and GMOs? As kids, this is what was missing—doing the food meta. Food was food was food was food. Some things like tomatoes came from a garden or nearby farmer’s field, and the rest of it, the boxed stuff, only came from the store. We didn’t ask questions about the who, what, where, when, and why that were involved. We didn’t understand the relationships between sourcing and silverware or money and its monopolization of our food choices at home, school, work, and play.

Despite the apparently generic packaging of my vegan-branded food transformation, I’m still happy with it. I would still pick its similar main ingredients comparison out at a store, despite it’s lower retail price and lower budgeted advertising. That is, I would still pick it out if said store were local and organic like a CSA share.

We’re in alignment about a few things in the CSA office. While administrivia may not rock our socks off, working to provide and improve access to some of the best organic veggies in our locality does, and is awesome, worthy work. We’re in agreeance about it, we’ve aired it out, and we’ve even circled back to it plenty of times. We come by our work through varied disciplines, but we love it. We are always happy to talk about (and eat) good food.

Thanks to Google Images for all pictures.