Eat Real Food: Community Supported Agriculture

Photos by The Bitten Word

All this talk of fresh summer recipes has me looking forward to Saturday mornings at the farmers market and feeble attempts at growing tomatoes in my back yard. (Topsy-turvy anyone?) This year though, my family has decided to try something new and buy a share in a Community Supported Agriculture farm (CSA for short.) CSAs provide weekly delivery of fresh produce during the growing season (around late May until the end of October). This means fresh, organic, sustainably grown vegetables all summer long straight from the farm to my dining room table. Sounds good, right? The CSA we chose to become a member of is called LotFotL, which is an acronym for “Living Off the Fat of the Land.” Their program offers over 80 items, rotating every week so your share will change with whatever is in season at the time- starting with things like asparagus and spinach in the spring and continuing all the way to onions and squash in the fall. Ever eaten a rutabaga? Me either. But if I get a bunch fresh from a farm one week I can tell you I’m definitely going to look up a recipe and try it out.

There’s something to be said not only for eating healthy, but also for knowing exactly where the food you are eating is coming from. So much of what we eat today comes shrink-wrapped in a package with all sorts of ingredients we can’t even pronounce on the back. I look forward to meeting the people who are actually growing the vegetables I will eat this summer and maybe even taking a trip out to the farm itself. (Yep, many CSAs encourage this. LotFotl even has a program where you can work for your share.) We also enrolled in their new Beefshare program so in the fall it looks like I will also be shopping for an extra freezer to house all the ground beef, steaks and roasts we’ll be carting home.

Lotfotl isn’t the only CSA in the Milwaukee area either. The Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition lists 42 certified Organic CSA farms around Wisconsin that you can choose from. In addition to produce and beef, some CSAs will also have things like fruit, preserves, cheese, eggs and poultry available. If you are interested, I suggest browsing through the list and choosing what’s right for you. A major selling point for us on Lotfotl- other than recommendations from friends- was that they have local delivery every week at our neighborhood Anodyne coffee shop in Bay View. Now on Wednesdays this summer I can enjoy a cup of locally roasted coffee while waiting for my veggie delivery to arrive. The only thing I need to do now is hone my cooking skills.

*Photos by TheBittenWord.com.