Ramblings: Food With Soul

This blog wasn't really conceived to be your regular food and recipe blog. Sure, we wanted a place to share recipes but we also wanted a place to describe the ways in which joining a CSA (Community Supported Agrigulture program) influenced or changed aspects of our lives or our thinking about food. Clearly, the excitement (and novelty) of a weekly fruit/veggie delivery has us all focused on the many great dishes we are cooking! As a result there has been very little commentary on the CSA itself. I do hope the rest of our team will share their thoughts soon.

Speaking for myself, I've always enjoyed food and cooking. Joining a CSA has not brought any additional enjoyment to the act itself although I am finding that I cook a lot more often and "just because". Perhaps it is the pressure to use everything up or perhaps, more likely, I am just expanding my notion of why I like to cook in the first place? I learned my way around the kitchen as a little boy watching my mother cook for the many small, intimate dinner parties she would throw and become 'famous' for. She used to get and enjoy a lot of attention for it and, if I am to be honest, I probably picked it up for the same reasons. Nearly every dish I've made since joining the CSA, both posted and unposted, is something I've made before and yet the preparation feels different. This leads me to feel that the change taking place has been more in terms of my relationship with the food and the skills themselves. Whereas before cooking was for company and special occasions, (to get noticed?), now it is just for me. The dishes I'm cooking are intended to be eaten more "routinely" by me and mine and not saved for others.

The title of this Sunday's New York Times Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristoff was "Food for the Soul". He writes about today's farming methods that, while efficient, also tend create a food output that is, to put it blunly, unhealthy. He describes how the food producers of today have no emotional connection to what they are producing. To gain efficency in production, assembly line produced food has lost its soul (and may even contain pathogens!) Its definitly worth a read. He doesn't tackle the issue of how it is probably impossible to feed the planet using only the small organic farms her prefers but he does make the point that there is a value in the output of small farms beyond the price and health relationship. While reading his column I realized that food producers, in this regard, have set a bad example for the rest of us: they have pushed down this lack of food "connection" to the end users, those of us who are doing the eating and cooking. For the most part, we are not cooks anymore, we have become food assemblers. Putting together meals from preportioned ingredients. Even in the produce aisle! How is it possible to have any kind of connection to a bag of prewashed lettuce or fruit that has been cut and made ready to eat in a container? By extention, how do we feel connected to anything we make from them?
Read more after the jump:

Everyone seems to find value in 'home cooking' and there are many hallmarks of this 'attribute' but I doubt any of them involve opening up packages and assembling food. That's what the cafeteria ladies in high school did. The people in your life might appreciate it when you buy them lunch or otherwise provide food but when you make the exact same thing 'from scratch', using fresh ingredients, the food is always valued higher than the equal item purchased elsewhere. Quite simply, the value of the truly home cooked meal is larger than the sum of its parts. This intrinsic increase in value is probably what allows us to be more forgiving of cooking's imperfections than we would be if we were dining in a restaurant. The patched together pie crust is a marker of a good home cooked pie, made with love, and not a flaw that spoils it. It is precisely the imperfection gives the pie its soul!

I really think we have to apply this same value to the produce we are getting in our CSA. So what if the zucchini aren't all the same size or you get a tomato with a brown mark? So what if you don't get to pick what is in the box each week? Yes, I know you can go to Whole Foods and get perfectly sized organic produce and you can get exactly the items you want. But will you? Or will you, like I used to do, just swing by Ralphs and pick up another souless bag of lettuce or worse, get take-out Chinese because nothing better is waiting for you in your refrigerator at home? I find that I am now not only embracing the pressure this box is putting on my cooking skills but I am also embracing the irregularity of the food inside!

This food may not be perfect but it sure has soul!

Misguided Study

Organic food is sometimes in the news! Some geniuses at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (huh?) have released a study concluding:


"there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority."Times UK reports the obvious response that Yahoo News left off:


"[The study] had not looked at pesticide and herbicide residues in food produced by organic and conventional farming methods. The study also did not seek to compare the taste of the products. So other than the fact that organic food might taste better and be free of pesticides and herbicide residues, there is no nutritional reason for buying it? Uh huh, ok.

“Real Food, Grown Locally!” We’ll take it!

This is our journey in enjoyment and experimentation with a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program at the workplace – so far it’s really catching on! Most of us have never participated in a CSA before so we decided to blog about our excitement, confusion, tips and discoveries related to the farm fresh bounty that is delivered to us each week.

For our group it started with a lecture given by a local farmer and CSA organizer – Farmer Donna. She hooked some of us immediately with the idea that we could eat fresh fruits and veggies that were harvested the day before they were delivered to us; she reeled in a few more with the notion that CSA participants know exactly where their produce is coming from and can trust the integrity of ORGANIC labeling from her farm; and the skeptics signed up after they tasted real home-grown tomatoes and oranges and saw what beautiful, bountiful produce came in just one box a week.

We’re learning as we go, but one thing is for sure - we’re helping each other, helping the community and eating better together.

No Need for a Skeptical Look.

Those that know me outside of the office know that I am a skeptic. I don't really take many claims at face value and that is especially true when so-called authorities in the 'wellness biz' make them. Like most skeptics I feel that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" so when wellness practitioners suggest that I do something or another, or buy something or another and everything will be wonderful , I will be healthy, or I will save money, I tend to take it all with a grain of salt. Enter Farmer Donna of Morning Song Farm.

Our company is blessed with a corporate culture that promotes wellness. We are also blessed with a HR team that is passionate about the environment. This often results in various speakers coming to the office who cause me to run to the research in order to investigate their claims. (For those in the office reading this and wondering about the score: Green Tea, YES; the Master Cleanse, NO.) So you would think that I would be skeptical when I when I showed up to Farmer Donna's seminar on organic farming. Not really. I had been exposed to organic foods since I was a teenager (a funny story for another blog post) so I didn'tneed convincing that organic was preferable wherever possible and affordable. It was the whole CSA part that threw me. I had never heard of it before.

Only moments after Farmer Donna's spiel began was I to feel my skeptic hat firmly in place. Turns out she was not just an educator that day but also a salesman! Anyone who has ever been approached by someone selling water purifiers, motivational tapes, weight loss shakes, vitamins, magnets that relieve pain, (you get the drift), knows that salesmen who are also 'educators' can be a dangerous proposition. And, in fact, Farmer Donna's spiel did contain a few of the classic fear statements salesmen use to kick us into immediate action. While prior speakers at work have told us that our water supply is slowly poisoning us, Donna's version had more to do with vegetable seeds going extinct and the harrowing prospect of worldwide famine should anything happen to the loss of heirloom seed inventory.

That said, the pleasant surprise for me here was that there are plenty of good reasons to sign up for a CSA program that had nothing to do with responding to fear statements. Similarly, you didn't even need to consider the "dollar saved" proposition (again, another good future blog topic):

• Doesn't it make sense to know the person growing your food?


• Exposure to knew vegetables and fruits you wouldn't ordinarly try.


• A chance to visit the farm.


• Produce picked one day prior.


• Higher degree of credibility regarding the "organic" label.


• Just doing your part to sustain local farming, keep money local, and support a distribution system that doesn't burn a lot of fuel shipping things cross country.

So, no extensive research needed. I'm in!