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Local business, local food?

Posted at 8:57 AM on April 24, 2008 by Cher Stuewe-Portnoff

The CSA season here has officially opened, with our first-ever Fair Shares pick-up!

When you buy a community-supported agriculture (CSA) share, as the grower's season goes, so goes your dinner table. We're experimenting with a combined CSA - several local growers and producers contribute, and low-produce weeks are balanced out somewhat with non-seasonal products. Members pay up-front; Fair Shares averages just over $50/wk. for 47 weeks.

Earlier, a typical week's delivery was projected to be something like this: 1 lb. meat - beef, lamb, pork, buffalo, chicken, trout - (av. $8); 7 lbs. seasonal produce plus 1 bunch herbs and a melon (av. $22); 1 pkg. cheese or butter (av. $5); a dozen eggs (3 of 5 weeks, av $3.75); 1 pkg. of local bread or pasta (av. $4), and assorted other goodies -- locally roasted coffee, mushrooms, preserves, etc. (av. $8). In theory, that would almost feed the two of us for a week, although buying at farmers' markets, we'd redirect some of that dairy money to protein or more produce.

Week one brought the following:

1# farm-raised trout
15-oz. pkg. of clean, perfect dried black beans
12 white flour tortillas, small
I pint jar of homemade salsa
10 oz. block of green-onion flavored Jersey cheddar cheese
1 doz. brown eggs
12 oz. green lettuce
6.5 oz. fresh shittake and oyster mushrooms
1 lb. Fair Trade Guatemalan med. roast coffee beans

Some items were labeled with the name of the grower or producer, ingredients and/or nutritional info; others weren't. So for us, this week we'll need to shop for quite a few basics that later in the season will probably be filling out the order: meat that can be used as seasoning instead of a main dish, whole grain bread, veggies. The match will become increasingly good, we think, as the weeks go by. The pick-up was easy and efficient - kudos to Mike and Mary, our neighborhood hosts.

Meanwhile, yesterday was an exercise in "what does 'local' mean?" We had breakfast at relatively new small cafe a few blocks from home. The owners have spent years working for good causes in Africa, then returned to the States for health reasons, and now operate the cafe to support other family members continuing the work. The food was simple and delicious, and we met some neat new neighbors. Local business, yes. Local food, no - not yet, anyway.

Dinner came with a last-minute invite to a discussion group in the neighborhood. Again, locally prepared, not locally grown - on the other hand, we had the opportunity at the table to talk about our new CCSA and to meet a couple of others who were already members.

We've been eating bread and granola from a local bakery, and it will be a supplier for our CCSA. Local business, yes. Local food? We'll check that out... where do the ingredients come from? In my journal, a local bakery is categorized "LB" - local business (small, family-run local business, that is) - until we learn whether staple ingredients are also locally grown. And that takes us back to the need for at least simple labeling even on CCSA foods, which will help folks know who is growing the ingredients going into these beautiful things that are coming our way this season, and where.

Eating locally as a new-comer in the center of this very urban environment, but one still surrounded by family farms within a 150-mi radius, definitely has its own flavor, opportunities and challenges.