CSA: the Best Thing Ever

I support community agriculture, and so should you.

Every week I walk twenty two blocks downhill to a house that is unfamiliar, cross there lawn and walk up the stairs to their back porch.  I look left, then right, and then I fill my reusable shopping bag with fresh, organic vegetables grown within the limits of Seattle.

Personally, I chose Amaranth Urban Farm in South Seattle. If you are in the area, you should know Nicole, the farmer, is awesome and the rainbow chard is to die for. If you can spare the $30 a week, only $15 if you split it, and pass up the Starbucks and chips, do it. 

The benefits, really, are endless. I am forced to eat fresh vegetables every single day that I purchased for a fraction of what it would have cost me at Whole Foods, PLUS I had to deal with no yuppies, hippies or over concerned soccer moms who bitch about the lines and I never have to hear about nutritional yeast.

That alone is worth the twenty two block walk home that, and this should be fairly obvious, is uphill. All twenty two low grade, root broken blocks of it.

However, nutrition and nutritional yeast free talk aside, it is also important to remember that by supporting a small farm, I am (and you can too!) support a local business and give a farmer a chance to do what they do best. As agribusiness grows, the need for man power is edged out by an abundance of mechanical horsepower. So these vegetables are dream vegetables, as in they are part of someone’s dream. And so am I (and you can be too!)

Around the world farmers are committing suicide, often in the fields that once supported them, because they are weighed down and downright destroyed by debt. Loans to buy seed are necessary in a market that is bent on driving down the bottom dollar to get these raw goods so large corporations can repackage them as “value-added”, corn laced processed foods. Food that has to be fortified because it has been stripped of all natural value so it can be shipped around the world.

The average meal travels almost two thousand miles.

This problem is not isolated. From a farmer Lee Kyung Hae, who committed suicide atop a fence protecting WTO delegates, to every Mexican farmer to chanted his name, all the way to India where farmers are drinking gasoline, people are united. However, they are united in filling the rungs closest to the bottom of the economic ladder. And why? Because of a change in agriculture policy made by Earl Butz, head of the Department of Agriculture in the 1970s (under funnyman Nixon), and the rise of agriculture conglomerates. Planting from fence post to fence post allowed these businesses to grow into what we see today:  thigh growing, penny pinching, IP mongering farm field bullies.

I mean, really, that is exactly what corps like Monsanto are. Round-up ready seeds that are only miracles supposing you buy every single expensive product they need to just survive, on loans typically because the nature of the market and unfair subsidies drives prices well below cost.

So say no to Monsanto and ConAgra and yes to a CSA. It may save your life along with someone else’s.