Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA), for newcomers, is simply pre-buying membership in a farm's produce, in exchange for weekly baskets during the growing season.
Basically, you buy into the risks and bounty of a given farmer's year, and you commit to a relationship with that producer.
CSAs put the eater and the grower in close contact. We have to speak to one another on a weekly basis, something that rarely occurs at the supermarket. The system also helps the local economy in big ways and small: together we're helping our region, our county, become a little closer to agriculturally self-sufficient.
If, as Homeland Security is always saying, our national food supply is at risk for bio-terror attack, the best solution is to diversify the supply.
Meanwhile, there's an added benefit to a CSA: the food is way fresher, and tastier. So, for example: this week we got okra, chiles, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, apples, peppers, onions, and a melon.
The produce is seasonal, of course. Earlier it was lettuce, garlic and strawberries; later it'll be acorn squash, potatoes and the like.
This is significant. Eating is, as Wendell Berry put it
, an agricultural act. It is profoundly humbling to understand just how connected we are to the work of growing food in fields.In the abstraction of our daily lives from the real world of gaining our life from the dirt, we are impoverished where we needn't be, and in the ease with which we fill our bellies, courtesy of our convenience culture, we are robbed of the very humility that can help us retain our sense of human finiteness.
To visit, then, with Mr. Pierce, as he asks about my baby, while packing my food--this brings about way more than entertainment and tasty tomatoes. It is goodness (broadly conceived).
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