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.

Sustainability Isn't Just About How It's Raised

An article in the New York Times on April 12, 2012 argues that sustainable meat cannot possibly be truly sustainable because raising animals sustainably requires far more resources (land, feed, etc.) and contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

But the author, James E. McWilliams, entirely misses a crucial point of sustainability. Sustainability isn't just about production; it's also about consumption. McWilliams argues, "If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs)." Well, I'd believe that, but it presupposes that we would continue raising the same number of cattle and eating the same amount of meat.

My family buys sustainable meat almost exclusively. The vast majority of that meat we get from Chestnut Farms meat CSA. Each month, we pick up a cooler filled with 10 pounds of beef, chicken, lamb, and pork, for which we pay $88. That may seem like a steep price to pay for meat, but it's what allows Chestnut Farms to produce high quality, sustainable, organic meat. We also purchase eggs from them and occasionally buy some goat meat for curry, ham or bacon ends for beans, or smoked polish sausage.

And, in general, that's all the meat we buy for the month. We do buy more meat for special occasions, such as a Thanksgiving turkey or a leg of lamb for Easter, but that's a rare indulgence. Now, think carefully about the amount of meat you bought last month. Did it exceed ten pounds? Fifteen? Twenty? Thirty?

American cuisine revolves around meat. It's the entree, the main dish, and everything else in a meal is generally selected to support it. We eat far, far more meat than we need, resulting in unsustainable meat production practices and poor health. What if you were to change meat from starring to supporting role? This evening for dinner, my husband made carbonara sauce using eggs, heavy cream, and three strips of Chestnut Farms bacon. It was completely delicious - yes, fatty, but we plowed our garden today and were in serious need of extra calories after all the digging. Most of our meat dishes are heavily supplemented with vegetables. When I make burritos, I use ground beef cooked with potatoes and carrots, served with brown rice and black or pinto beans, along with lettuce and tomatoes and a substantial vegetable side dish such as calabacitas (zucchini, corn, onions, and cilantro, topped with cheese).

We do supplement our meat with fish, but again, the fish tends to be a spice or condiment rather than the main course. We'll eat pickled herring as an appetizer, or my husband will make kale and sardine stew (this is much, much tastier than it sounds). I love making smoked trout salad with onions, apples, capers, pickles or cucumbers, pecans, and fresh herbs. We also grow our own gourmet mushrooms and use them as a delicious protein source.

By eating less meat, we are eating healthier, saving money, and helping reduce our burden on the environment. Sustainable eating starts on the farm and ends at the dinner table.