Monday, July 9, 2012

Farmers to You

When we recently moved to Beverly, almost exactly a year ago, we came missing our old Brookfield Farm CSA. Casting about for a replacement, we found Farmers to You, recommended by a friend back in Cambridge. It has been a tremendous boon to our family out here, where the nearest Whole Foods is in Swampscott, precisely because it is NOT a CSA.

Farmers to You is a consortium of local food producers in Vermont. Many of them are organic farmers, providing exactly the sorts of fresh produce we'd expect to get in a farmshare, but there's so much more, including:
  • Dairy farmers (cows and goats), providing milk, cream, yogurt, eggs, ice cream, and some truly fabulous cheeses. 
  • Meat farmers, providing beef, chicken, turkey, pork, and sausages.
  • Bakers and mills, offering fresh breads, pizza crusts, and pies as well as organic flours, oats, rye flakes, and granola.
  • Other food producers, providing pickles, jams, pesto, maple syrup, honey, even soups, black bean burgers, tofu, and rice milk.
And the beauty of this model is that you choose what you get each week. Just login to the F2Y web site, and you'll be able to browse their offerings and choose what you want in your order that week, so long as you order at least $40 worth. I'm not sure if this is true at all sites, but here in Beverly, we order by midnight on Sunday night and get our orders delivered to a nearby distribution site on Wednesday.

F2Y has distribution sites all over the Boston area, from Newton to Newburyport. If you're interested, and there isn't one near you, just get a group of friends together and ask if they can add a distribution point near you. Schools, churches, and community centers are great places for distribution centers. When we first started at F2Y, our nearest distribution site was at a nearby Waldorf school. But just a couple of months later, one of the intrepid teachers at our daughters' school, Harborlight Montessori School, organized a distribution site there, so we happily switched.

It is so very easy. Order my food on Sunday, pick it up on Wednesday when I pick up the girls. Even with a burgeoning garden running over with fresh vegetables, I easily hit that $40 mark each week. My typical order includes half a gallon of organic whole milk, a pint of organic heavy cream, some fresh chevre, a dozen eggs, and whatever else we're low on. For most of the winter, I got fresh greenhouse spinach, important in managing my anemia. In the spring, I was delighted to get asparagus, strawberries, and fiddlehead ferns. This week, I'm getting fresh green beans and beefsteak tomatoes, since mine aren't quite ready yet. In the fall, we're looking forward to apples and cider.

Who needs Whole Foods? I can get most of my groceries this way, effortlessly, without the temptation to impulse buy while walking through the aisles of a grocery store. Of course, I still do need to shop occasionally; laundry detergent and sundry toiletries, breakfast cereal, and whole wheat tortillas all draw me out to the local Trader Joe's. But I find that I spend less and less time at the store as F2Y's offerings continue to expand. I would love to see more local offerings such as mushrooms, handmade soaps, oils, and lotions, even "Eat More Kale" T-shirts.

My one gripe is that this food all has to be driven down from Vermont. I recognize that this is a slightly silly gripe. New England is very small, and all of it would fit easily inside my home state of New Mexico. Still, why get produce from Alamogordo if you live in Albuquerque? I'd love to see a similar consortium of Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire farmers and food producers. F2Y is a good model, and I hope other areas around the country will adopt it.

Disclosure: I'm now the site host for the Harborlight distribution of F2Y. The intrepid teacher left on maternity leave in February, and I took over. I unpack the orders from their crates, add in the bread orders (kept in a cooler to prevent crushing) and any frozen items from another cooler, receive and keep track of returned bottles and bags, and sell a few extras to members and nonmembers alike. For this, I receive a $30 credit on my order each week. I love doing this, honestly. I'd do it for free because I love meeting and talking with other parents interested in healthy, sustainable, local foods.