Eener's Farm

My life has been spent bouncing between the suburbs and the city. I grew up in suburban New Jersey where corn fields gave way to developments in the span of my childhood. I've lived in a Mietskaserne in Berlin, an attic bedroom in the working class neighborhood of Brighton in Boston, and more recently, Uptown, in Minneapolis, which for Minnesotans is dense, but for me was still an urban oasis with its chain of lakes in walking distance from my brick oven of an apartment. Even though I now live in a suburban "townhouse' (they're rowhouses where I'm from) on a cul-de-sac, I still harbor a fascination for farm life, or at least a romantic view of it.

So that I could live my fantasy life, Chris and I bought a farm - well, kind of. We bought a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share. In short, we pay for a subscription upfront, which helps the farmer support farming operations for the coming season, and in return, we receive a weekly share of the crops throughout the growing season. The risk we take is that weather, pests or some other disaster could ruin the crop or at least diminish the amount of food we receive each week. More information on the concept of CSA's can be found at http://www.localharvest.org/csa/ or http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/csa/csa.shtml. Given that I know nothing about farming and couldn't even keep the herbs alive that I bought at the St. Paul Farmer's Market last year, belonging to a CSA is actually the perfect set-up - someone else owns the farm and is responsible for growing the food, and I receive a box each week with the bounty. And I still get to visit the farm whenever I want to.

I'm really looking forward to being a part of Eener's Farm located in Boyceville, Wisconsin, a hour and a half drive from our home. I had the opportunity to meet Renee and other farmers a few weeks ago at the River Market Coop in downtown Stillwater at the CSA Fair and Farmer Panel. Renee was the only female farmer there and is the fourth generation to farm her family's land. She's roughly my age, has a young son, a husband and a black Labrador Retriever, and except for that fact that her life growing up on the Wisconsin farm must have been vastly different from my life in suburban Philadelphia, I felt like we could relate.

I have wanted to join a CSA for awhile, but this is the first time Chris and I have felt comfortable committing to something because we know we're not moving anywhere. Eener's allowed us to purchase a half share at half the price, which means we'll get a more manageable half a bushel box worth of produce, and it will be dropped off every Wednesday at the coop and stored in a refrigerator until one of us can pick it up. Since we don't live close to the St. Paul Farmer's Market anymore and our deck isn't conducive to gardening, the CSA is the closest I'll get to farm life for the time-being.

My reasons for joining a CSA extend beyond wanting a piece of farm life without actually having to physically grow the food myself. It's the next step in continuing a healthy lifestyle and my understanding of where our food comes from. I look at how far-removed my generation is from food - when it's grown, how it's grown and how it's cooked - and I've decided I want something different for my children. But how will they learn if I don't know either?

Changes in the way I thought about food began by becoming vegetarian my freshman year of college. This was before I'd ever even heard the word organic (as it relates to food) or the words "local," "food" and "grown" in the same sentence. I naively thought that the only way my decision would effect me would be that meat would be eliminated from from my diet, but was just the beginning of a series of lifestyle transformations. Since arranging a meal based around meat was no longer applicable, I discovered lentils, chickpeas and tofu and new cuisines like Indian, Thai and Mexican (believe it or not, I don't think I'd ever eaten Mexican until I went to college). When I no longer had Bowdoin's award-winning dining hall to eat at, I learned to cook. Dinner parties became one of my favorite entertainments. I went to Germany and discovered (surprise!) a bunch of vegetarians in my dorm. They were equally surprised to meet an American who knew how to cook (or at least tried to cook - spaghetti was still one of the few dishes in my repertoire)and defied their stereotypes. I loved shopping for fresh vegatables and cheese at the Marktplatz, I back in the States I discovered farmer's markets and coops. I began to care about nutrition and understand what constitutes a balanced meal, whether you're a meat-eater or not. While I remained a vegetarian, my diet radically changed over time as I made small changes to eat more healthfully. Then concern about where and how our food is grown reached mainstream America and I began to think more seriously about not only what was good for my health, but the health of the environment. Yes, I'd jumped on the local-is-better-than-organic bandwagon, even if I haven't gone as far as subscribing to the 100-mile diet - a superhero-like challenge in winter in Minnesota.

So when people ask me why I'm vegetarian, it's not such a simple, short or obvious answer anymore. Growing up with a meat-and-potatoes diet, living abroad and then making friends with my "earthy crunchy" classmates in college pushed me in the direction of adopting a vegetarian diet, but now it's become a way of life and has lead to me to new ways of thinking about our food culture, food itself, and how it's produced. The CSA allows me to go back to the basics and learn about Minnesota produce and when it's in season and how it can be used.

I anticipate belonging to a CSA to be a culinary adventure. A few days after we joined, I stumbled upon an article on www.slate.com - "The Locavore's Dilemma: What to do with the kale, turnips, and parsley that overwhelm your CSA bin," (http://www.slate.com/id/2214524/) which gave me a good laugh because I already knew this is totally what I'd be getting myself into. One of Chris's friends says he can't wait until I'm overwhelmed with beets and wants to see if I'll be able to come up with anything. The beets will be a challenge, but I hope there'll also be tons of bell peppers and tomatoes and Chris and I can finally make our own salsa since the jars Chris's Uncle Pat brings at Christmas last our household until about New Year's Day.