Do you have any experience with CSAs?

I’ve hesitated to get one because we’re only a household of two people and have no one to split it with. However, it’s a great cause, and if I thought it would be size-appropriate, I’d totally do it!

I belong to a CSA in San Francisco (Terra Firma).

Pros:
Local, sustainable food (obviously)
Delicious food
Cheap food (for the quality)
Food you’ve never tried/wouldn’t normally try
Forces you to make meals at home instead of eating out

Cons:
Food you don’t want (though easy to pawn off onto friends)
Constrictive pick up schedule (for my CSA at least, they don’t do house delivery)

It’s just me and my wife and we get a small enough box that it’s generally the right amount of food. Terra Firma provides three box sizes and we get the smallest one, it’s like 60 a month.

I worked on a farm that had a CSA and I’ve also purchased shares in various CSA’s. What we found on the farm is that most people were excited to purchase a share and participate in the CSA, but they didn’t always know what to do with all the produce they received and often times they would end up throwing vegetables away that didn’t get used. So we ended up creating a newsletter that was included with everyones share that had recipes for using the vegetables that would be found in that weeks share. This allowed us to introduce people to vegetables that were new to them and to teach them how to use these vegetables in a meal.

So my advice would be to get a good cookbook that contains recipes for some of the more obscure vegetables that you might be likely to find in your CSA share.

Well, you’ve already heard my answer to this question, over “there.”

Long story short: not being able to choose your individual vegies leads to lots of spoilage. I can’t have just any zucchini, or just any ear of corn. Nice concept, though.