Eat Outside the Box

Tuesday was our first CSA (community-supported agriculture) day, courtesy of Eat Outside the Box. My mom went to pick up the produce in Lafayette. It was a very decentralized, informal affair: she parked on the street, walked into a CSA members' backyard, and weighed our share of the produce. She bagged it and drove home. Refreshingly non-corporate. Whole Foods is great; it has lots of organic, free-range food, but it also has a giant brand and suppresses unions. In addition, Whole Foods doesn't offer you the opportunity spend a day working on the farm where your food is grown (like Eat Outside the Box). CSAs encapsulate Dorothy Day's description of anarchism:

"an order made up of associations, guilds, unions, communes, parishes, voluntary associations of men [sic], on regional vs. national lines, where there is a possibility of liberty and responsibility for all men."

Anyhow, our basket came with all of this produce: garlic, lettuce, chard, pea greens, peas, lambsquarters (a spinach-looking green!!!), arugula (and arugula blossoms), Valencia oranges, tangerines, baby carrots, mint, Rainier cherries, and apriums (I think it should be "apria" but Wikipedia doesn't think so).

But not only did we get all of this delicious, fresh, and unique produce, but we got (in an email) five different recipes that incorporate the produce we picked up. My mom has already prepared three of the recipes (a spread, a salad, and the sauteed vegetable recipe below). I grow snowpeas myself, but I never would have thought to consume the blossoms, stalks, and leaves along with the pods. Genius!

Sautéed Snow Peas, Sugar Snap Peas, and Pea Shoots

SELF | July 2008 by Anita Lo

This summer side cooks quickly, so the veggies retain their nutrients.

1 tablespoon canola oil

6 large cloves garlic, finely chopped

1/2 cup chicken stock (or water)

1/3 cup oyster sauce

3 cups snow peas, strings removed

4 cups sugar snap peas, strings removed

5 cups pea shoots

Heat oil in a large, shallow pan over high heat. Cook garlic 30 seconds, stirring to prevent burning. Combine stock and oyster sauce in a bowl; add to pan. Add peas; cook, turning peas constantly, until bright green and crisp, about 2 minutes. Divide among 8 bowls; top each with a handful of pea shoots.

Thanks to Michael Iafrate of the blog Catholic Anarchy for alerting us to the Dorothy Day quote (this post).

In the beginning...

The Hammill family tries to make it a practice of having "family nights" on Sundays. We play games, read (usually the Bible), and talk about our week. A few weeks ago I (Ryan) got to lead the family night. I designed the curriculum, planned the game, and directed the activities.

A couple days prior, my parents and I watched "Food, Inc" the Oscar-nominated documentary about the food system in the United States. It covered feedlots (CAFOs), fast food, and corporate abuse, among other devastating topics. Letting the credits roll without changing my lifestyle felt uncomfortable.

Fast forward to Sunday night. I had four readings: a section from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Timothy Gardener's essay on modern meatpacking, Wendell Berry's "The Pleasures of Eating," and an excerpt from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together. While all the reading out loud got a bit tedious, Sinclair's description of rat feces being dumped into sausage, Gardener's expose of modern meatpackers' exploitative tactics, Wendell Berry's steps towards action, and Bonhoeffer's call for joyful meals were lost on no one.

After a racing game involving strawberries and sprinting down the narrow hall (with an injury), we sat down to discuss our next steps. The first was to subscribe to a CSA farm--community-supported agriculture. By paying a monthly fee, the consumer receives a box full of produce from the farm. Doing this is intended to move our dietary habits closer to a local farmer who isn't abusing workers, destroying the soil, and sending produce hundreds of miles away to rack up a carbon footprint. The second step was to develop a similar tie to a local meat supplier, in order to dissociate our consumption from the big meatpacking firms. The third step was for John, Christy, and me to begin cooking meals together in order to learn more about what we are eating and appreciate the work that goes into it.

The blog is the fourth step. Originally, it was going to be part of the meatpacking, in order to raise awareness about food justice. But it'd be much better to cover our entire food adventure with it.