WEDNESDAY CSA BLOGGING

Psychedelic Bear is totally psyched to be the lucky recipient of a half-share from Chubby Bunny Farm’s CSA this week. All this gorgeous produce—almost as colorful as Psychedelic Bear himself—needed to find a good home because its owner, our friend Anne, has gone off on a camping trip and didn’t want to see all those veggies go to waste.

So we collected her half-share from the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew and now we’re blessed with corn, broccoli, kale, tomatoes, potatoes, a Sweet Dumpling squash, apples, pears, and the ubiquitous mesclun. For all this, Anne pays about $14 a week, because she splits a share with our friend Amy, who decided to join a CSA after hearing Sandor Katz sing the praises of Community Supported Agriculture at an Eating Liberally book party for The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved.

Psychedelic Bear is especially psyched about the half gallon of delicious raw milk, because he likes to think of himself as a nonconformist, and unpasteurized milk is as daring as dairy gets, these days. It costs extra (about $4.50), but it’s well worth it! Raw milk is what everybody used to drink, but nowadays, it’s treated like contraband in most states. Chubby Bunny’s website puts all the fuss in perspective:

Back in the 20s, Americans could buy fresh raw whole milk, real clabber and buttermilk, luscious naturally yellow butter, fresh farm cheeses and cream in various colors and thicknesses. Today's milk is accused of causing everything from allergies to heart disease to cancer, but when Americans could buy Real Milk, these diseases were rare.

Real Milk comes from real cows that eat real feed. Real feed for cows is green grass in spring, summer and fall; green feed, silage, hay and root vegetables in Winter. It is not soy meal, cottonseed meal or other commercial feeds, nor is it bakery waste, chicken manure or citrus peel cake, laced with pesticides.

Chubby Bunny recommends the real milk website if you’d like to find out more about the campaign for raw milk. All I know is, the milk tastes unlike any milk you’ll find in a store. And it makes mighty fine ice cream, too. I’m pretty psyched, myself.