Wednesday morning I was helping load the delivery truck and it made me happy to think of all our members who will receive their shares. Freshly harvested the day before, they will most likely be transformed into a healthy home cooked meal by the evening.
Most of you will agree that a weekly CSA share makes a small but not so insignificant difference in our daily lifestyle. To prepare and cook with the produce we receive takes time, it slows us down, and it creates a breather. In our family it’s a ritual to come together to prepare and share a meal at least once a day – usually dinner. Sharing food becomes the conduit for bridging time and space and renewing our bonds as a family. It’s a moment to catch up on what happened that day, an opportunity to complain, praise, reflect, laugh, and share the latest news about work, school, friends, and family.
It may seem like an insignificant and humble act how we decide to eat our meals and what we decide to eat, but I am convinced that collectively it plays an enormously important role. Most of us eat three meals a day and although we know food is grown on farms we don’t know what farms, what kind of farms, where the farms are, or what kind of skills and practices are involved in farming. Many in our society have grown so removed from the source of where food comes from that food is pretty much an abstract idea until it shows up on a grocery shelf or on the table. What motivates me as a farmer is to grow food that nurtures and reestablishes the intimacy of food and community. It is, I believe, a vital building block to a healthier and more peaceful world.
The election may be over and one might question how much an individual vote really matters in the current political spectacle, but outside of that spectacle I can’t help but be an optimist when I see so many people in the food and farming communities making a real difference in establishing a participatory nourishing food system for all.
A double rainbow at the Farm during Saturday’s rain storm.
