CSA

Oh, you car-crazy, meat-mad Americans, look what you’ve done now! Everybody else wants to live the way you do, wolfing down Whoppers behind the wheel. So they’re ripping up rainforests to grow more grains for cars and cows, and that’s just accelerating global warming, which is worsening the droughts that are ruining crops from Australia to Zimbabwe.

As Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, told NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday, the current global food crisis wasn’t caused by some sort of temporary setback such as crop failure, but rather “systemic change” due to increased worldwide demand for meat and the fool’s gold rush to produce more biofuels, which Brown cites as the proverbial last straw:

Meanwhile, the subdivisions where so many of us park our precious cars--and our dreams--have proven, like Beanie Babies and Thomas Kinkade paintings, to be a less than stellar investment, leaving millions of Americans looking for a new bubble to float their boat while Wall Street and the rest of the world blanches at the prospect of a global recession.

But though our carnivorous, fossil-fueled lifestyle’s inadvertently worsened a worldwide shortage of grains and other staple crops, it’s also created some terrific investment opportunities! As the UK website everyinvestor recently declared, “Buy Food…It’s The New Gold:”

My unequivocal answer is yes! But not in the conventional, commodity crop sense that everyinvestor meant. Forget about corn and soy shares; buy yourself a share of the harvest from one of your local family farmers instead.

It’s called a CSA--Community Supported Agriculture--and in return for an investment of a few hundred dollars upfront this spring, you’ll be rewarded all summer and fall with fresh-from-the-farm produce picked each week at its prime and packed into a box just for you.

Good as gold? I’d argue that it’s even better; after all, when food’s in short supply, you’re better off with carrots than carats. You can’t make stock out of bullion.

Here in the land of milk ‘n’ honey, milk prices are soaring and the honeybees we need to pollinate our crops are all going AWOL. The Washington Post reports that the cost of milk’s shot up so high that one school district in North Carolina’s gone back to serving its kids Yoo-hoo drinks, “which had been taken off the shelf in favor of healthier options…Sure, officials would rather the kids chugged milk. But each Yoo-hoo sale brings in 36 cents of profit.”

American institutions and individuals alike have been addicted for decades to cheap processed foods, aided and abetted by our own agricultural axis of evil: Agribiz, Big Food, and bottom-of-the-pork-barrel politicians. But with higher food and fuel costs looking likely to be the new normal, we may finally be ready to shed the shackles of this corrosive food chain.

Community Supported Agriculture offers an alternative model of farming that nourishes us, the land, and our local economies. It produces fresh, healthy food, preserves open space, and enables small family farmers to actually make a decent living. In short, it’s the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak food forecast.

Ironically, uber-urban New York City’s at the vanguard of this pastoral phenomenon; we’ve got 60 CSAs right here in NYC and another 120 elsewhere in the state, giving New York the highest number of CSAs in the nation.

You may have only just started to hear the buzz about CSAs, but this grass-fed, grassroots movement’s been growing for more than twenty years now, as one of its pioneers, Columbia University nutrition professor emeritus Joan Gussow, noted at the recent CSA in NYC conference held at Columbia and hosted by Just Food, the powerhouse non-profit that’s done so much to promote the growth of CSAs in New York.

Gussow, author of This Organic Life: Confessions of A Suburban Homesteader and a mentor to Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan and the rest of us progressive foodie activist types, calculated that currently, a CSA feeds one out of every 727 New Yorkers, prompting Just Food’s executive director, Jacquie Berger, to reply, “Yeah, but we’re aiming for one out of 7.”

The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik described Berger as “startlingly young-looking” in a piece last fall on the local foods movement, and she is, but as Gussow’s anecdote illustrates, Berger and her colleagues at Just Food are also wildly ambitious--and rightly so, according to Gussow, who’s been living La Vida Local for decades.

You might expect Gussow to be just a bit weary of fighting the good food fight after all these years, but she may in fact be more optimistic than she’s ever been about the prospects for our food culture shifting to a more sustainable model. As she told those of us who gathered for the Just Food CSA in NYC conference:

And hope, as we all know, is a hot commodity these days. Maybe even hotter than corn and soy. So log on to Local Harvest or the Eat Well Guide and find the CSA nearest you! Your investment will be rewarded with some of the sweetest dividends ever.

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.

Michael Pollan’s been running around the country scribbling “Vote With Your Fork!” at book signings for his bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The idea is to boycott the industrial food chain by, say, shopping at farmers’ markets or joining a CSA.

But as Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle and Pollan himself noted at the Princeton conference last week, we can’t just shop our way out of the problems plaguing our food system. We have to change our nation’s agricultural policies.

A slide in Nestle’s power point presentation summed the problem up nicely; for $5, McDonald’s will sell you five burgers or one salad. While the FDA dutifully chants the “more fruits and vegetables” mantra, our government manages to make beef cost less than lettuce thanks to the agricultural subsidies that make fast food so “cheap.”

Fresh produce, by contrast, is for the privileged, or at least that’s the perception. A faint aura of elitism hangs over the stalls at the Greenmarket, with its artisanal cheeses and biodynamic purple broccoli. Foodies find all kinds of exotic--and expensive--epicurean oddities and delights.

But farmers’ markets are actually a pretty egalitarian enterprise; where else do shoppers rub shoulders with world-class chefs vying for the finest and freshest from our local farmers? And most of the produce isn’t pricey at all—there’s no middleman, so your dollar goes farther, and it all goes to the farmer.

The problem is that farmers’ markets are generally located in more affluent neighborhoods, while many poor communities are a virtual wasteland of bodegas and fast food joints. This sad phenomenon even has a name, now; such neighborhoods are known as “food deserts,” i.e., “areas of relative exclusion where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy food.”

We’ve come a long way since that historic day on February 1st, 1960, when four young black men launched a sit-in at a “whites only” lunch counter in a Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina.

“I wanted a cheeseburger with french fries,” recalled Jibreel Khazan, whose name at the time was Ezell Blair Jr. Woolworth’s refused to serve him.

Now, of course, there’s no shortage of fast food joints flooding the inner cities with all the cheeseburgers and fries they can stomach—and then some. What’s lacking is access to healthy foods. The end result has been an explosion of obesity and diabetes among the poor; it’s a terrible cost to pay for all those cheap calories.

There’s a movement to fight the food deserts, with programs to bring more farmers’ markets to poor communities and school cafeterias that serve food from local farms. We need to encourage these efforts, but we’ve also got to lean on our government to scale back the subsidies that promote agribusiness monoculture, and ramp up support for the small and medium-sized farms that grow all those fruits and vegetables the FDA keeps telling us we need to eat more of.

Let’s see them put their money where their mouth is, because this “eat what we say, not what we subsidize” routine is getting really old. The message from Marion Nestle and her “food cop” colleagues? Get political. Fight the food system that makes beets cost more than beef.

Update: Submitted by kat on November 22, 2006 - 03:01pm.

From my lips to God’s ears: Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn have just announced that New York City will name a food policy czar who will be charged with raising the amount of healthy food sold in low-income neighborhoods. Here’s hoping other cities will follow suit.