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GUILD: Rewarded with farm-fresh produce
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Published: June 30, 2008
I like that I know where my eggs come from, and I mean personally. When I sat down to breakfast this morning, I knew I could thank Biddy Boop, Little Bitty and Aunt Jemima, some of the hens out at Sanders Ridge Farm in Boonville.
Why am I on a first-name basis with a bunch of chickens? Because I have the privilege and luxury of belonging to a Community Supported Agriculture association, better known as a CSA. In essence, each spring I buy a half-share in the Sanders Ridge Organic Farm, and, starting in May, for 22 weeks I get a heaping wax box full of vegetables and fruit (about five pounds' worth) each week that I can pick up in the West End.
The growth of food guilds, farm shares and CSAs is the result of many factors, from the development of a new movement called Slow Food to the acceleration of the "locavore" trend, which asks people to eat food primarily grown in the areas where they live.
The issue of where food comes from and how it gets to us has become even more relevant as fuel prices rise, causing the cost of fruits and vegetables to go right through the roof of the chicken roost where my egg-producers hang out. Any recent trip to the supermarket will confirm that among the most expensive items often seem to be those healthy green, red and orange things that come out of the ground and off the trees.
Many of us grew up with backyard vegetable plots, or at least grew tomatoes, peppers or corn along the back driveway. But then it became easier and easier to stop at the supermarket and find "fresh" produce from anywhere in the world, no matter what the growing season happened to be.
Raspberries in the middle of winter? No problem -- they come from Chile. Bananas or fresh pineapple at any time of the year? We now take this kind of access for granted, without really thinking about how not-ripe the fruit was when picked and put into refrigerated trucks, which then had to travel thousands of miles before being polished, sprayed, waxed or buffed for optimal display.
The beets that came in my box this week still had big clumps of dirt on them. But they were a lovely deep red, and smelled like the ground they had been recently dug out of. We were supposed to get edamame this week too, those great little Japanese beans, but the rabbits out in Boonville got to them first.
That's part of the fun of being a CSA member. You learn to get back into the rhythms of the land, discovering what ripens when, how unbelievably good really fresh herbs and veggies taste (to deer and bunnies, too), and just what in the heck to do with swiss chard.
Cindy Conti, who grew up in Greensboro always wanting to grow things, has spent the last three years of her life (day and night, seven days a week) making it possible for us to enjoy this bounty of nature. She was fortunate enough in 2005 to meet Neil Shore and his sons, seventh-generation farmers in Boonville who were hoping to start a winery.
Conti, who had worked at Rag Apple Lassie Vineyards down the road, pledged to help with the winery if Shore would give her some unused farmland, help fix up a greenhouse and turn what had been a tobacco farm into an organic vegetable paradise. She started growing in the spring of 2006 after signing up four or five couples from various homeowner's associations.
Now she's up to her maximum of 74 customers, and she's sending the people begging to be added to her delivery route to a new CSA that another farmer, L.Q. Thomason, is starting out in Boonville.
If we could grow a few dozen more Cindy Contis, we'd all be eating better and saving energy, revitalizing local agriculture and keeping the open space and farmland that contribute so much to our quality of life in the Piedmont Triad.
And I'm still trying to figure out just what to do with swiss chard.
■ Dale Pollock, a former dean at the School of Filmmaking at the N.C. School of the Arts, now teaches film there.
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