Community Supported Agriculture is a great way to eat mostly organic produce while supporting local farmers. In our case it will be the local University which is always great. This is a threefold benefit that really encompasses the goals of sustainability:
- Economic: by supporting local business and buying organic at competitive prices
- Environmental: less fossil fuel expenditure for travel and organic farming practices that tend to be better for environment
- Social: by eating a nutritious diet of organic produce (or any produce!!) the burden on society is reduced by lower heath costs AND Rutgers also gives produce to local schools and shelters
I have been wanting to join a CSA for a very long time however, the costs and amount of produce associated it with it was always a barrier. No more! Since the majority of what we eat is plant-based and we have easily gone through our weekly greens we can definitely pull this off. What I like is that they give you sizes for their bunches in 2009. It's very comparable to the organic produce we purchase at Wegmans every week.What a great way to celebrate Earth Day...
We participated in food co-op last year based out of Montclair and loved it. I particularly enjoyed the "surprise" element of it. We never knew exactly what was going to be in our bin when we went to pick it up. Occasionally, we still didn't know what was in it once we did! That was the fun part. We got to learn about some foods we'd never eaten. There was also a somewhat "Iron Chef" element to it as we'd open the box of secret ingredients and then have to plan 2 weeks worth of meals with them. It was fun...and tasty!
ReplyDeleteCool - the Iron Chef element sounds fantastic. We were talking about a guacamole Iron Chef just this week.
ReplyDeleteEvelyn